Quote:
Originally Posted by pwalker8
At one time, back in the day, before all the publishers consolidated into a few mega corporations, quite a few publishing houses had a specific selection criteria, a voice if you will, that meant that, if you liked that criteria, then you liked most of the books that publishing house put out. Baen publishing was the most recent example, though it's voice has changed quite a bit since Baen died. It's been a while since I bought every baen monthly ebook bundle.
Tor publishing has a fairly consistent voice as well. I suspect this voice is what people are talking about when they talk about using publishers as a filter. So someone who is a fan is thinking Tor publishing, not Holtzbrinck, the parent company. I think if you think of it in that manner, the idea of a filter makes more sense.
|
Until the internet became household--and even only after ebooks had made their initial surge onto the scene--I couldn't have told you who published my favorite authors. It just never occurred to me. Publishing houses weren't relevant to me. They still aren't. I just finished a fairly popular backlist title by a fairly popular scifi author. Without going back and looking, I've no clue who published it.
Now maybe I'm the odd one out in that regard, but I doubt it. I've a feeling most readers (casual and avid alike) are unaware of any "voice" a particular publishing house might have. I would never assume I'm going to like something based on who published it. It wouldn't occur to me.
I know Tor publishes Science Fiction, but I wouldn't consider that a very helpful filter (assuming I even notice that a book is published by Tor). I don't like all science fiction, after all. I've tried to read a lot of tradpubbed, very competently edited scifi garbage.
Sorry, but I have to believe that readers who are publisher-sensitive (let alone publisher-centric) are a pretty niche group. Most are author- or genre-sensitive, and as a consequence, fairly publisher-agnostic/ignorant.