Quote:
Originally Posted by NightGeometry
The hole in this argument is that there are books published that are, if you'll pardon my brute language, unmitigated crap. I read one recently, it was from a house who normally publish authors I like, this was, as far as I know, a first novel, the subject was good but... it was just crap. I bought it, and read it, and won't read that author again. It was a trade paperback. I recently read an ebook from a first time author, I hated that too, though it fulfilled the same criteria as the pbook I read. The ebook was offered by the author for free, though given the description I'd have probably paid £2 for it, regardless of it being self published. I won't read either author again, but for trying one I am out of pocket £6, for the other... nothing. Guess which model I prefer.
[Snip]If I want to try a new author then I take a risk that they'll actually not be very good and that is the case regardless of whether they are from an established publishing house or not, unfortunately.
There is of course an 'unless' - unless it is an author that is recommended to me. I try new authors 'on spec' (I like the cover, it sounds interesting, et cetera), a few a year. I also try new authors that friends and colleagues recommend. The recommendations from friends do tend to be authors I like. Some of the on spec books I read are rubbish, I don't recommend those to friends and colleagues, the ones I enjoy I do. I truly believe that this is not an unusual system of new authors getting readers, and I really don't think self published ebooks suffer under this systems - or won't, once I convince more of my friends that ebooks are the way forward 
[Snip]So basically, publishers don't real do anything for me, in an ebook world. Now editors, that is another matter. I wouldn't be surprised to see collectives of editors and publishers working together, maybe even setting up their own epublisher. (At this point I really want to mention ebooks going punk, but I won't).
I also read an interesting post from Charles Stross, who I believe is a member here, on his blog about publishers being very important to authors, due to advances. I don't know the author / publisher side of the bargain, and this I do understand that I only see one side of the story. |
I think you're overlooking the bookseller/distributor end. Note that I do *not* usually find new authors based on recommendations from others. Few of my friends-and none of my family, AFAIK, share my interests. (Some of my kids even look blank when I talk about reading a book. I do *not* understand where that comes from.)
Anyway, I usually find new authors by searching lists of books for sale and see which (by synopsis/description) might appeal to me. Fairly high success rate that way, but I'm sure as h*ll not going to take the time to search the whole Web to find new websites set up by new authors.
I'm sure you can come up with other ways of finding new authors-maybe people who are willing to search them out & compile the lists-but the current system, with many authors 'feeding' one publisher and many publishers 'feeding' one distributor works-in the sense of putting the books out in front of people. If we're going to replace that, let's make sure we replace it with something that fixes the shortcomings without creating new problems in areas where the current model works very well.