[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by RickyMaveety

Yeah, I don't think I phrased that very well. What I meant to say was that I hate to see a great author turn out dreck because he's not doing very well physically/mentally and the editors/publishers just want to make money off the dreck, so they go ahead and publish it. Not a comment on why RAH wrote it as much as a comment on why it was published as it was.

Publishers are in business to make money. They make money by selling books. The stuff that sells is often not what they might want to publish.

Master chef Anthony Bourdain commented recently that he'd love to have a small restaurant, where there would be perhaps 60 patrons for dinner, and he could lavish attention and craftsmanship on each dish. But he can't, because he'd be out of business in a heartbeat. He needs to serve a lot more than 60 patrons a night for dinner to make enough to even cover his costs, and his challenge is maintaining the quality of the food when he is serving hundreds a night instead of tens.

So it is with publishing. At one point a while back, SF editors might find themselves in the position of finding the least bad manuscript in the slush pile, because they had four slots to fill that month, and only had enough quality manuscripts on hand for three. Publishing only three books instead of four was not an option: they were afraid that if they only published three, they'd lose the shelf space normally allotted to the fourth, and not get it back.

More recently, the well respected head of Little, Brown was fired. She'd been under pressure from the group executive she reported to at the conglomerate which owned her imprint to publish more bestsellers. She resisted, because Little, Brown was perceived as a "quality" imprint publishing work of literary value, and she felt she was being asked to cheapen the line. My suspicion was that her boss didn't want to fire her, but he was under pressure from his superiors, who wanted better numbers from the division.

The editor might wish for better work, especially from someone like Heinlein, but they have to buy salable material.

Nekokami mentioned the two books with which I was probably the most disappointed: The Cat Who Walked Through Walls and To Sail Beyond the Sunset. It got to the point where everytime those oversexed twins showed up ... I just started skipping pages.

_Cat_ felt like marking time to me. _Sail_ I found a bit better.

I guess those are the equivalent for me of the Pope telling Michaelangelo "Just hurry up and finish the damn ceiling. I don't care what it looks like! We've got a line of tourists out here who are willing to pay good money to see it." I'll admit, I'm scrambling cultural references and timelines to make a point.

That's OK, and you're right. But I suspect Michaelangelo did get the equivalent of that. We think of him as one of the great artists of all time. Back then, he was a painter, living on commissions from church officials, and required to do what the patrons wanted within a specified time frame. If he couldn't or wouldn't, there were plenty of other aspiring artists happy to move in.

Yeah, I like this forum too. If only because much of the time I run across people whose perspective is very narrow. They can't think outside the box, and frankly don't ever want to. Some of them are very nice people, but they are not people who are going to give you a lively debate ... about anything. And, they have no clue when I say the best thing about a good argument is that it makes you think about your own position ... you have to if you are going to defend it. Sadly, all to often these are prople that consider "thinking" to be blasphemy of the highest order.

Most folks prefer not to think. Easier, all told, to go on automatic and handle as much as possible by reflex. Having one's worldview and perceptions challenged can be an uncomfortable and frightening thing.

I corresponded years back with a woman on an SF forum who was a fundamentalist who didn't believe in evolution. I wasn't quite sure how she came to read SF and participate in the forum with that worldview, but there she was. She had never read Darwin because her parents thought it shouldn't be read. All I could say was "Your parents did you a disservice. You should read Darwin. You may not agree with him, but you can't meaningfully argue against someone when you don't know what they actually said!"
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Dennis