Do you read or avoid books recommended by Oprah Winfrey?

[Seabound]

Originally Posted by lilac_jive

Pride and Prejudice fiasco?

An Austen fan submitted what were essentially manuscripts of Austen's works to several publishers. And he was rejected:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...ejections.html

[lilac_jive]

Originally Posted by Seabound

An Austen fan submitted what were essentially manuscripts of Austen's works to several publishers. And he was rejected:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...ejections.html

Interesting, I hadn't heard about that.

[Alisa]

Originally Posted by Seabound

An Austen fan submitted what were essentially manuscripts of Austen's works to several publishers. And he was rejected:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...ejections.html

It is quite possible that they rejected them because they didn't want to engage in any further communication with a crazy person. If they figured they might have some deranged soul on their hands who actually believed they wrote Jane Austen's novels, it would seem simpler to send a generic rejection than involve themselves and invite reply by pointing out the facts. I probably would have done the same.

[Darqref]

I tend to think of Oprah's recommendations as a gentle vote against it - not because I dis-like Oprah, but because if Oprah read and liked it, her past recommendation history is such that it is likely I won't like the subject and genre of the new book. She almost never chooses to feature a book that I would have the slightest interest in reading.

Now the READER, on the other hand..... I wish she could feature another piece of hardware every month or so, just to make the presence of electronic readers a fact of life in the awareness of the general population.

[Seabound]

Originally Posted by Alisa

It is quite possible that they rejected them because they didn't want to engage in any further communication with a crazy person. If they figured they might have some deranged soul on their hands who actually believed they wrote Jane Austen's novels, it would seem simpler to send a generic rejection than involve themselves and invite reply by pointing out the facts. I probably would have done the same.

More likely the sample chapters were not read at all. They were unsolicited submissions after all, without an agent. There was one Alex Bowler who did call the fraud. But, perhaps, if Oprah had recommended Lassman, his books would have been published. I would have loved to own a first edition of First Impressions.

[mjh215]

Originally Posted by Alisa

It is quite possible that they rejected them because they didn't want to engage in any further communication with a crazy person. If they figured they might have some deranged soul on their hands who actually believed they wrote Jane Austen's novels, it would seem simpler to send a generic rejection than involve themselves and invite reply by pointing out the facts. I probably would have done the same.

I thought something similar while reading it... I would imagine just saying 'Thank you for your submission but we are not interested at this time' would be a standard response from a publisher's legal department. Of course for someone 'struggling to have his own novel published' there has to be more to the story then that no one likes his work or they just passed over it. So of course the publishers are idiots. I tend to think most of them either didn't read it or did and didn't want to deal with it. And the media just likes a good story. Hell, the "seems like a really original " comment might have just been a sarcastic response.

-MJ

[Jellby]

There is a radio show on the French national radio called "Des Papous dans la tête", it's dedicated to literary games and creations... One of the games is "blind literary diagnostics", where someone selects a portion of text from the work of a known writer, and 4 of the collaborators (they are writers and knowledgeable people themselves) try to guess who the writer is (or at least the period of writing, the style, whether it's a translation or not...).

They fail quite a lot, even when the person that selected the text gives three possible names to choose from.

I'm not surprised an editor does not recognize at first sight the first chapter of "Pride and Prejudice".

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by Jellby

There is a radio show on the French national radio called "Des Papous dans la tête", it's dedicated to literary games and creations... One of the games is "blind literary diagnostics", where someone selects a portion of text from the work of a known writer, and 4 of the collaborators (they are writers and knowledgeable people themselves) try to guess who the writer is (or at least the period of writing, the style, whether it's a translation or not...).

They fail quite a lot, even when the person that selected the text gives three possible names to choose from.

I'm not surprised an editor does not recognize at first sight the first chapter of "Pride and Prejudice".

off topic, but i LOVE "Des Papous dans la tête" !! now that i think of it, i haven't listened to it in a long time. now that i have a working radio again i must get back to it.

[radleyp]

I find it hard to believe that an editor would not recognize the first line of Pride and Prejudice which is one of the most famous openings in all of literature: That this is the case, however, says a good deal about the literary background of editors.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by radleyp

I find it hard to believe that an editor would not recognize the first line of Pride and Prejudice which is one of the most famous openings in all of literature: That this is the case, however, says a good deal about the literary background of editors.

Well, I'm not a native English speaker, I haven't read much English literature (I still have to read "Pride and Prejudice"), maybe it actually is such an identifiable piece of text as you say... I would recognize the first words of "The Hobbit" or "Don Quixote", though.

[lilac_jive]

Originally Posted by radleyp

I find it hard to believe that an editor would not recognize the first line of Pride and Prejudice which is one of the most famous openings in all of literature: That this is the case, however, says a good deal about the literary background of editors.

From memory:

"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."

There's no way they read his manuscripts, the more I think about it.

[Alisa]

Originally Posted by lilac_jive

From memory:

"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."

There's no way they read his manuscripts, the more I think about it.

Yep. Even if they read it, I'm sure the form rejection letter went out after that famous first line.

[HarryT]

There are very few publishers these days who do NOT automatically reject unsoliticited manuscripts - Baen are one of the few exceptions. I doubt the publisher even looked at it.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by Alisa

Yep. Even if they read it, I'm sure the form rejection letter went out after that famous first line.

Here is an interesting article about this:

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion...ks-457943.html

Apparently GPs give their patients an average of six minutes before they are shown the door of the surgery. The average author sending an unsolicited script certainly gets much less. Publishers now rely on specialists - agents, in fact (think of them as the consultants of the publishing profession) - to supply them with novels, though we all still buy some non-fiction directly from authors. To plagiarise, it is a truth universally acknowledged, that the most celebrated fiction houses now only buy fiction from agents. All serious aspiring authors know this and seek out an agent as an essential stage in the process of finding the right publisher, and of course the best contract too.

That means the unsolicited fiction is now the leftovers. A terrifying proportion of these manuscripts come from people writing in green ink on scraps of Basildon Bond - surely its only use now. And if they aren't in green ink, the manuscripts arrive handwritten in capital letters, or from prison, or from a secure mental hospital. Of course there may be lost masterpieces lurking in the mad rantings of the sad, the bad and the dangerous to know (to plagiarise again), but publishers are not social workers.

One of the first things every editor is taught is that the rejection letter should be final, that is, it should not give any opportunity for a response. When you return the manuscript you never want to have to think about it again. So it is fatal to suggest that, for example, the plot is quite good but needs work in the closing chapters, or that there are too many characters, or that the dialogue needs work. Send these suggestions to the writer you don't want and you are entering the long-term relationship from hell, because in three weeks the manuscript will come straight back at you with the changes you have recommended. So publishers use euphemistic - all right, let's be honest, weaselly - phrases when rejecting manuscripts, like "not quite right for our list" or "would not fit our publishing programme". The clear subtext is that the manuscript is unpublishable and the writer should consign it to their bottom drawer. For ever.

Finally, let's get personal and specific. David Lassman, über-Austenite, has sought publicity with the news that a number of publishers have rejected his plagiarised Austen novels. His game is one played on unsuspecting publishers every two or three years and it always brings a wry smile to some faces. Last time it was Fay Weldon, and who knows who will be next? But it proves nothing. Jane Austen is, without question, canonical, but she is not contemporary. She is not the new voice that publishers are looking for. Why would editors now look for a writer describing riding down streets on horses, wearing petticoats, or ordering broughams to call on neighbours, visiting card in hand?

[lilac_jive]

Originally Posted by tompe

Here is an interesting article about this:

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion...ks-457943.html

Yikes, the author of that article passed on Freakonomics?

I recently learned that Cassie Edwards, the top selling Native American romance author, was caught plagiarizing. Here's an article from one of the people she copied:

http://www.newsweek.com/id/94543