Quote:
Originally Posted by eschwartz
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Reviews, word-of-mouth, best-seller lists, etc. etc. means one can easily limit oneself to the cream of the trad-pub crop.
Reviews, word-of-mouth, best-seller lists, etc. etc. means one can easily limit oneself to the cream of the indie-pub crop.
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Do you agree or disagree?
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On the other position that you take, that it's as easy to find good indie books as good traditionally published book. I have to disagree. Not terribly surprising since I've put of more than a few rants on how hard it is to find good books. First, I'm going to talk about fiction only, since non-fiction is a very different kettle of fish.
This is where the publisher as the gate keeper comes into play. For years and years, I found that I liked the majority of the books that Baen publishing put out. That made it easy for me to find new authors. Since Jim Baen died, I find that my tastes don't match the new management quite as much. I do check out their monthly publishing schedule, but the days of buying all the monthly bundles are long gone. It's not as much a matter of quality as taste and quality. I found a number of new authors through Baen. Before Baen, I think Del Ray was the imprint of choice. Perhaps you never found an imprint that matched your taste as well as Baen matched mine.
The second publishers as the gate keepers thing is if a publisher put major marketing muscle into a new author, then the odds were pretty high that they thought the author was a winner. That's how I found Robert Jordon. The first Wheel of Time book came out as a trade paperback in a time when most new books went directly to paperback, so it caught my eye (that's and the cover).
A third point is what I call the Amazon issue. My preferred method of looking for books is to see what has come out since the last time I looked. Most bookstores that I use to frequent had a new books self in each section and they didn't throw the porn, romance and public domain books in with the SF&F. I find Amazon farming out the maintenance of their book database to anyone who claims to be a publisher to be very frustrating. One can find a lot of pointers on the internet telling would be authors/publishers how to game the system.
Some people really like using social media and sites such as goodreads. It's not really my cup of tea. One sees similar issues on some of the threads here. Someone ask for a specific recommendation and mentions some of the books they like. Then people recommend their favorite books, regardless of if there is a match or not. I appreciate that people want to be helpful, but it doesn't get me any closer to books that match my taste.
Perhaps some day, as book search engines improve and people figure out how to monetize things like the old SF newsletters, it will be as easy to find good new authors regardless of how they are published, but IMPO, we aren't there yet.