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Originally Posted by tompe
I really do not believe that you can read a couple of paragraphs and decide if the book is good or very good or if it is only OK. An OK book is also a book that fall within you tastes.
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it takes a modern agent/editor/reviewer 3 pages (if that) to decide on whether a book is worth publishing (the First 3 Pages is a very famous book about this very process and why writers should not ignore it). I simply take this to any work that I'm deciding upon and reduce it. Read the first 3 paragraphs of any book and you'll have a really good idea of what's coming up and whether that's something you'll really want to continue with. If it's taking you a 100 pages to make a decision on whether you like a book or not, then maybe you do need to be told what to read by the gatekeepers.
Here are the opening paragraphs from two traditionally published books, to make my position much clearer (any choices I make here, can easily be transferred to the independently published)
It was a pleasure to burn.
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Death, in this forsaken place, could come in many forms. Geologist Charles Brophy had endured the savage splendour of this terrain and yet nothing could prepare him for a fate as barbarous and unnatural as the one about to befall him.
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Now, one of these is quite clearly brilliant and compelling, while the other is a bunch of old tosh and I wouldn't read beyond that first paragraph. Can you guess which? Anyone with half a brain can, and it's definitely not the second quoted paragraph. I wouldn't even need a page to discern that the second example belongs to a story so bereft of imagination and anything of worth that to continue would be to my reading as a full frontal lobotomy would be to my emotions.
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I am waiting for better gatekeepers to appear to replace publishers. Independent publishers can have an OK reputation and can work as a filter. An independent publisher is not the same as a self publisher.
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Again, I don't understand why you are so reliant on the opinions of the publishers (whose bottom line is money making, lets not forget. They no more care about fiction than McDonalds do about gourmet cooking). Can't you make those decisions for yourself? Do you need someone else to assign value to a cultural product before you feel safe enough to try it for yourself?
The internet erases the line between self and independent, it's all one and the same. If you're waiting for some authoritative body to come along and wave a magic wand so you can feel secure that your fictional choices are restricted only to those sanctioned by them, then you're out of luck. Doomsday, or the day Dan Brown writes a compelling story, might come first.
