Quote:
Originally Posted by Moejoe
I believe the publishing companies are directly responsible for the amount of terrible writing that is self-published, and why? Because they publish so much garbage themselves....
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Sorry, that doesn't follow.
The publishers act as a major filter in the process, albeit with their own standards and biases. If you can't get your book published, your next option is to self-publish. Some self-published authors may hire professional editors, but many will not -- either because they misjudge their writing skills, cannot afford an editor, do not have the connections to find a truly great editor, and so forth.
I.e. if your work doesn't appeal a publisher, and you still want your work to be read, you're going to try and self-publish. At a minimum, this is likely to cut you off from critical resources that will improve the quality of your work, e.g. good editors.
I see no particular evidence that literary quality overall is falling; I'd be surprised if a year goes by when someone declares that some media or another is "dead" or "dying." The trope that "humanity is in decay" was thoroughly ingrained by the time of Hesiod (with his Ages of Man, falling from the Gold era to the "Iron" age) or, in Hinduism, that we entered the *cough* Kali Yuga era circa 3000 BC, an age of dissolution in which humanity is as separated as possible from divinity. And works of high literary quality were hardly always best-sellers, nor were the most influential works necessarily those of the highest literary value. We tend to review the past through rose-colored glasses, in part because the mechanisms of evaluating cultural history tend to emphasize works of higher quality (e.g. reviewers, educators etc), and this only reinforces negative evaluations of contemporary quality.
If anything, we are entering an era where people can access far more content, across all kinds of borders, with lower barriers than at any time in history. Even if literature becomes less popular in the short term, there is absolutely no way to know what kind of social pressures will influence various mediums. How many foresaw the cultural impact of music circa 1967, even in the early 1960s? Or the enduring influence of cinema, which was supposed to be utterly demolished by now by TV and/or the Internet? It could even come down to a single individual whose work happens to strike the right chord at the right moment, and voila, a medium can soar in popularity, a rising tide if you will.
So I see no specific reason(s) for a negative evaluation of the medium as a whole.