Quote:
Originally Posted by bigbadburninbush
Well that's just it. Amazon says we should pay attention to Stephenie Meyer. A lot of attention! Even though amongst those who value the written word, it is well known that she can hardly write. Her books being full of mistakes and common prose. I believe that great voices shine through based on their intrinsic qualities, however in this time it seems that market interests can all but drown it out.
So we're talking about authors. And that used to imply some quality, but sadly now not really, hence the need to distinguish. I guess that used to be called 'taste'.
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I disagree with you on almost all points here. There have always been bad authors since there were authors, and there have always been badly published authors since there was publishing.
Meyer would've been a famous and best selling author with or without Amazon. Amazon did not make her famous. There have always been authors who sell well who aren't considered good by the more literary or more elite crowd.
And, by the way, there have always been people bemoaning the erosion of civilisation in any given time, and our present time in literature just happens to point to Amazon and self-publishing as some current scapegoats.
Not that there isn't loads and loads of rubbish in self-publishing. But it is democratising publishing and allowing less easily pigeonholed authors to be heard, and one can easily ignore self-published works if one wants. I rarely look at self published works unless it comes highly recommended, so I don't feel my choices, selection and percent of quality literature that I peruse today are any different than 10 or 20 years ago.