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Originally Posted by Catlady
All I care about as a reader is that I have something to read that, first, meets minimum standards of quality, and that's why I only consider books from actual publishers.
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I care that the content is within my range of interest, which is why I started branching out from traditional publishers. And most of the fanfic I read is better edited than a lot of published books; I've given up on the belief that "professional publisher" means "quality editing."
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If you want a filter for the glut of self-published books, well, we have that already too: the publishers and literary agents.
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And yet they fail to provide me with 80,000 words of funny RPG anecodotes. The M/M erotica in the Big 6 is also sparse, and the selection in the indie houses is of random quality levels; they haven't all sorted out editorial standards, and the market is so niche that they don't know how to advertise to people who're selective within it.
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I seriously doubt self-publishing is the first choice of a writer.
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It didn't used to be; that's changing. A lot of newer authors are noticing that there's not a whole lot of incentive for (1) signing over 70-90% of the cover price to someone else, for the entire sales life of the book, and (2) waiting three years between an agreement of "this is good" and income starting to get to the author.
By going the trad publishing route, the author has a chance of catching you as a customer. By skipping it and self-pubbing, the author has a chance of catching me as a customer. As things currently stand, no author is going to get both of us as paying readers. (I dunno... do you buy self-published books that were reclaimed by the authors after the initial print run expired?)
Since the big publishing houses are never going to cover the range of books I'm interested in--at least, not anytime soon, because the print market for them is too tiny--I'm looking for ways to find good content.
I could just skip paid books altogether and read fanfic. That genre, I know how to find the good stuff for, and it's practically infinite. It'd probably keep me happy for many many years, but I wouldn't be supporting any authors by paying them. Well, except for the handful of fanfic authors who go pro.