Quote:
Originally Posted by charleski
Anyone who knows much about the publishing trade knows that editors don't pick books based on literary merit - they pick the books they think they can sell, so publishing is not, in fact, providing the sort of gatekeeping role they used to.
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To be fair, I think the latter type of gate keeping is enough for most of us.
Speaking of novels at least, I don't want to read a book because it will be a classic in 10 years, I want to read a good story. Stuff sells because we want to buy it.
An editor friend of mine said she couldn't read Stephen King books because she felt compelled to go through them with a red pencil.
But I like them, so I buy them.
That being said, thanks to a local used book store, I've been able to try a fairly large number of books just based on a cool cover pic or the stuff written on the back, and the remarkable number of books I've found to be unreadable leads me to believe that whatever the gate keepers motives, they don't serve my interests any better than the 1000s of reader/reviewers on Amazon, and maybe not as well. So I feel no more likely to be wasting my time in trying a self-published ebook with good reviews than I'd be trying an unknown paperback from a traditional publisher.