Quote:
Originally Posted by darryl
My experience is that it is no more difficult to find a good book now than before the explosion of Indie Titles. The actual crap is usually avoided with very little effort and there are far more books available in any particular areas in which I like to read. Based on my experience publishers did little if anything to eliminate the 90% of crap. In fact, they seem to have published quite a bit of it.
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Same here.
The "unnavigable ocean of crap" mantra perpetuated by those who seek to artificially maintain a general "level of quality" divide between indie and tradpub is old and tired; and not nearly as relevant as they'd like it to be. Mostly because people don't need to
swim the entire indie ocean (any more than they'd swim the entire tradpub ocean hoping to bump into a book they like). Cream still rises to the top in the usual ways: samples, word-of-mouth, promotional sales, giveaways, best-seller lists, and reviews from people whose opinions you've come to trust.
I know of very few people who jab their hand blindly into the tradpub pie hoping to pull out a plum by pure luck (on a regular basis anyway). So I fail to see why they think finding an indie book they can love should somehow be that "easy."
If it's about the basic "competence" or skills of the author ... I say who gives a R. A.? I feel no need to differentiate between a terribly written book and a competently written book that I thought thoroughly sucked. I find it very hard to believe that very many people who find a tradpub book they didn't like at all, comfort themselves with feelings of, "well at least it was competently written." Didn't like is
didn't like, in my book.
90% of
everything is crap... to someone, some where, at some time. Period.
The "ocean of crap" meme would only be relevant to someone who bought every single one of their books sight-unseen through some utterly random method. The tradpub ocean would certainly offer that kind of imaginary reader a better shot at discovering a
competently written book than the indie ocean. But I know of no reader (at least of fiction) who's searching for competently written books. They're looking for books they love. And their chances of finding one through some utterly blind poke-and-hope method are equally slim regardless of the ocean they're in.
What the Ocean-of-Crappers are REALLY saying is; "the dogmatic curation tools/methods I've let myself become overly dependent upon (to select reading material from the familiar ocean of crap I've learned to navigate) may not help me a lot in this new ocean of crap. So I'm going to passive-aggressively belittle this new ocean of crap rather than adapt the least little damn bit."