Quote:
Originally Posted by Catlady
Yes, there's no denying that the major publishing houses do put out some horrible books, but the odds are better that they've weeded out a lot of the dreck, and that when dreck gets through, at least it will adhere to minimum standards of spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Whereas there's absolutely no way to know if someone's self-published work will even be coherent.
I just think it's ironic that people apparently want a way to separate the wheat from the chaff when that's exactly what the traditional publishers attempt to do. Frankly, I think the traditional publishers are more relevant than ever nowadays when every person who can use a computer thinks he or she can be a published author. Sure, some can really write something worth reading. But most can't.
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I agree with everything but the last part about "most." I've actually been pretty surprised that at *least* half of what I try that is self-published is 3 star or better. I used to review books and reviewed/read 3 self-published at that time (years ago, before kindle, etc). Only one was good. One was unreadable and the other was ... Oh, it might have been 3 star, but I didn't finish it (bored.) So my impression was that there were no 5 stars at all.
Being in the game now, I do filter through a lot of self-published books and am actually shocked at how many are at least 3 stars. I don't read those that have obvious grammar/spelling issues out the gate, so that could be coloring my results. The ones that are HUGE, HUGE disappointments are ones that really seem to be going along at 3 and 4 star...and then suddenly go into the weeds near the end. Oh, those make me mad. I read almost an entire one that was decent enough until the last 1/5 or so--it was a cozy mystery (with more foul language than usual, but followed the general tropes) that suddenly included an orgy or three, wild sex that wasn't part of the orgy, possession and a lame wrap-up of the plot. I'm *still* mad about having wasted my time.
I'll let you know when I get over it.