Quote:
Originally Posted by Maggie Leung
Free books bear a cost. The time I waste looking for a good book and reading dreck (even briefly) is time I'd rather spend doing other things. Given that, I'm willing to pay professionals to do filtering and editing. Of course there's no guarantee that professionally screened and edited books will all be good reads; I prefer the odds.
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Note - posted before I saw Maggie's comment on her preference for non-fiction. That more or less puts her out of the market we're discussing here.
One can say that about many aspects of life, Maggie. Choosing a piece of software, going to a concert, buying clothes - do they fall apart after three months? And yes, the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval that Simon and Schuster have pulled this one out of the mailbag can be a way of passing the responsibility over to others - or filtering the dross, if you prefer.
But making choices is a fact of life, and sometimes making wrong ones is what I would call a cost of living. And I'm thinking of the hundreds of other potentially good authors whose work was in the same bag as the one that S&S pulled out, but who got the rejection slip. I'm prepared to give some of them a chance. One can usually tell after only a few pages whether one is prepared to spend time on a book or not. And reading books is not something I do for a living so that reading a bad one is a loss of profit, so I'll take a chance on a freebie, and even on a $2.99 one once in a while.