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Originally Posted by anamardoll
Elfwreck, every time you post, I want to tattoo your post on my arm or something.  |
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* (And it MUST be all bad, right, because more quantity of self-published books must mean a dip in quality, right? Has anyone actually gathered any kind of actual data on this?
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No hard numbers, but... the percentage of atrocious self-published stuff is much, much higher.
As lousy as some of the mainstream published books are, they all have tolerable grammar. They all use punctuation. They all capitalize the first words in sentences and the word "I," unless they're being incredibly artistic and have a reason not to. They all have plots that go somewhere. They don't have fifteen pages of dialogue with no descriptions of action. They don't switch POV within a single paragraph. I haven't yet seen a short story or novel written in txt-speak, but I'm sure it's just a matter of time. I have seen txt-speak used seriously as normal words. ("R" and "U" are the biggest culprits.)
Self-publishing has brought a lot of wonderful books that would never have been considered by a publisher--but it's also brought out every wannabe writer who thinks that having a story idea is the same as having a finished novel.
Plenty of things could serve as a gatekeeper, but what we're getting now is unfiltered--not only the stuff that got rejected because it was badly written, but the stuff that was never submitted because the author was too lazy to figure out how to write a cover letter & send a manuscript through the mail.
There are some *incredible* free self-published ebooks. But finding them among the dreck could be a full-time job. I expect, though, that over time, we'll find some sorting/recommendation methods, and in ten years, we'll have a decent list of the good stuff from 2010--and it'll be a lot more diverse than the NYT bestseller list.