Quote:
Originally Posted by darryl
This is of course your prerogative. Personally I regard whether something has been traditionally published as a very poor criterion. Big Publishing's track record as curator or gatekeeper is IMHO woeful. So much absolute garbage has been published by them and so much worthwhile excluded. I wouldn't trust them to shop for my avocados!
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Quote:
Originally Posted by GeoffR
If publishers' standards are so low, all the more reason to try and avoid books by those authors who can't meet them!
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Publishers' standards aren't "low".
They are "orthogonal".
What darryl is saying is, that publishers have done a terrible job at being a standard for good/worthwhile books.
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My main problem with judging a book by it's publisher is, that the only thing being tradpubbed tells me is that it received a baseline competent proofreading to fix grammar and spelling gaffes.
And honestly, I have read one or two tradpub books which I do not believe actually went through a spell-checker!!!
But generally, yeah, that is what tradpub excels at -- turning vomit into proper English. In addition to promotion, which is what the author cares about not me.
The one criterion which is the easiest to filter through without any dependence on tradpub, is the one criterion which I can actually trust them to reliably help me with.
So what do I need them for, exactly?
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In fact, to point us more generally back at the OP's complaint, that is what usually puts people off of self-published books.
The literary vomit which doesn't even pretend to be actual English.
"[...] books that read like they had been written by a third grade English grammar drop-out [...]"
This is what you won't see in tradpub books. It is also really easy to spot a mile off in self-published books.