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Originally Posted by garygibsonsf
I'm sorry, but that's just plain nonsense. The power has always been in the hands of the audience, and they have always defined what succeeds and what does not. The history of publishing is littered with failed attempts to figure out just what it is people want to read; endless mega-figure book deals by authors you never heard of because, by and large, their books sank without trace.
Do you think the Harry Potter books succeeded because of some cynical corporate strategy? They succeeded because kids read them and loved them enough to recommend them to their friends - and that single, ultimately highly democratic word-of-mouth process is by far the most powerful factor in publishing today or in any other time. Books that do well are almost always ones that get recommended the most by friends of the potential purchaser. Very often the big promotion comes after a book has already succeeded, and the publishers see an opportunity to spread word of it farther. If a book receives early promotion and press, it's because the agent and publisher are skilled enough at what they do to recognise they may have a big property on their hands, but ultimately it's a gamble in the face of a fickle and unpredictable audience.
One or two people here really need to read up a little on how the industry actually works, rather than treating it as some kind of mass conspiracy. I recommend you start with something like Donald Maass's 'Writing the Breakout Novel', which lays out some of the realities of why some books hit big, and other's don't. There's nothing worse than uninformed opinion.
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And there's nothing worse than someone who assumes that a poster has formed their opinion without being involved intimately with the 'industry' or is uninformed.
I've read Donald Maas's terrible book, and lots of others besides that explain nothing and everything at the same time about an industry controlled by four or five mega-corporations (not a conspiracy, a fact). I've been through the treadmill myself, and I won't go back to the ridiculous system where the author is last in line, not first. Where writers beg for attention to self-appointed intermediary's like agents and publishers, instead of a direct one-on-one with the reader.
I know you have a book deal, and I know you want to protect the industry you belong to, but I do not belong to that industry, nor do I actively seek participation in the treadmill any longer. For one, it's too slow, it moves at a glacial pace and I do not. I write -- a lot -- and there's not a publishing contract on Earth that would accommodate the output. In this Brave New World I can publish immediately on Feedbooks (my personal favourite) or any number of other places. The publishing industry can't offer me that freedom, and it never will be able to as long as its bottom line is selling units instead of nurturing writers.
And you talk of Harry Potter as though it was some grass-roots movement that made it popular. No, it was bought on the premise that it would make money, that it would shift units in the very first instance. Harry Potter is one of the most derivative works of children's fiction produced in the last fifty years, and also, if truth be told, overwritten. Its value was not as work of art, or even work of entertainment, but as 'product'. You're right, of course that nobody can determine 'what' will make it big, but it doesn't stop the publishing companies from trying, does it?
Go look at the shelves of your local bookstore or WH Smiths, wherever the latest and greatest are sold and tell me what you see. How many more detectives have to track how many more serial killers before that tired old genre dies out? How about the billionth rip-off of Tolkien or the latest unedited pablum of post-accident Stephen King? How about another James Patterson factory-thriller, churned out by a committee of dedicated prose murderers? How about some gaudy uninspired chick-lit or novelizations of TV series? You seriously think any of this is there because the publishing companies give a crap about fiction? Come on, who's the one with the uninformed opinion now?
The audience only gets a 'choice' on what the 'publishing companies' deem worthwhile. What the publishing companies think will 'sell'. It's a business, and as a business the publishers are interested in profits and nothing much more. Whereas the writer 2.0 can publish whatever the hell he/she likes, they can offer that work to an audience unbidden by ridiculous contracts and build a 'readership' from the ground up.
Whether the Writer 2.0 gains an audience is another matter altogether. But I know where I stand, and it's firmly on the side of individual freedom and the death of the intermediary corporate taste makers.