Are publishers really interested in good writing?

Discussion in 'Traditional Publishing' started by OurJud, Sep 15, 2017.

  1. Homer Potvin

    Homer Potvin A tombstone hand and a graveyard mind Staff Supporter Contributor

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    And it's in Amazon's interest to solicit as many self pub authors as possible. Deflating the egos of would-be authors by offering keep-it-real reviews, which would not be favorable in most cases, would be bad business for them. Writers don't want to hear the truth. They want to hear how awesome they are.
     
    Last edited: Sep 18, 2017
  2. 123456789

    123456789 Contributor Contributor

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    Well, that's a good thing, and yes, I am going to explain, but not without a healthy dose of rhetoric.

    I believe that most successful institutions ultimately corrupt and restrict society. What always liberates us is technology. The printing press enabled the enlightenment which freed us from Monarchs. Industrial revolutions led to factories which ultimately helped end slavery in the U.S. Later, of course, when men's muscles were no longer valued, thanks to machines, women's rights came along, and so on...

    I'm sure everyone here agrees that the changes the Internet is making have just begun. You can listen to any song you want now without having to buy a 20$ CD that has 12 songs you don't even care about. You can look up the ingredients to a recipe while you're at the supermarket. You no longer have to be lied to by corporate media like Fox or CNN.

    Now we have television and movie streaming. Let's look at Cable T.V. You have to watch the show at a specific hour and day or record it. Worse, you have to watch commercials that only seem to take up more and more of the television time as years go by (last I checked, haven't watched cable in years). Let's look at Hollywood. It's nice to get out to the theater, sure, but it's also nice to stay in. With the latter, you can do it any time of night or day, you don't have to drive or walk there, and you don't have to be stressed out about being late for the show. Plus, you can pause, rewind, and talk. It gets much better than that.

    Cable is about mass audiences. Hollywood is about mass audiences. It's not a secret that these industries, especially Hollywood, have evolved. We're talking about multi million dollar projects that are about offering massive returns. These are projects written by teams. These are projects meant to sell merchandise. They're often projects that aren't even intended to sell well to an American audience. I don't think anyone here will argue(you never know on WF) with me here that Hollywood is in most cases no longer trying to produce something visionary.

    This is not the case with HBONOW, Amazon, Netfix, Hulu, etc, that buy their own shows . See this link. http://www.pubexec.com/post/hbo-chief-attracting-audiences-talent-content-subscribers/

    What is HBO's strategy? "Talent+content=subscribers". It's not just about marketing for them. They're not afraid to take risks (I have a reference on this if interested let me know). And it's a winning strategy. You have a lot of unique content there which you won't find in Hollywood or Cable. True Detective was a show entirely written by an actual novelist, no team of screen writers. New Twin Peaks on Showtime was a David Lynch and Mark Frost product, not something created by a hundred different writers. This gives us shows with a purity in vision you won't find elsewhere. The key here is to be willing to take a risk.

    Amazon publishing has something traditional publishers don't. They have amazon. I can tell you two facts. One, I buy all my books on amazon and >99.0% of them electronically on Kindle. Two, there are very few brand new traditional novels that interest me, and of those that have, the vast majority of them have disappointed me in a way older novels almost never do. This means that if there are more people like me, there is a potential market that Amazon can satisfy, that traditional publishing can't, because one, I don't buy hard copies of books and two, I'm not really interested in the type of things they're publishing right now.

    I hope my long winded description of internet streaming has enabled you to see the parallels. Netflix, HBOGO, etc, let you watch quality entertainment at your own leisure wherever and whenever you want. Amazon Kindle lets you read instantly wherever and whatever you want--you just have to download it. Where the parallel currently fails is that while Netflix, HBO, etc, are buying potentially risky shows, these shows are still top quality, whereas with Amazon self publishing, these books are not only risky, there's zero guarantee of quality. That's why I don't want to read them either. But when you think about, Amazon is half way there to fundamentally changing the reading industry, just like how streaming sites are doing now with television.

    I've always wanted to do traditional publishing, myself, for the validation, but thinking as a fan of technology, I would be happy if Amazon just got their own editors, reviewers, and cover artists, and went ahead and replaced an industry that I'm starting to feel like is becoming outdated and disappointing.
     
    Last edited: Sep 18, 2017
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  3. jannert

    jannert Retired Mod Supporter Contributor

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    Yes, there is that factor of the competing publishing arm. Ach well, back to the drawing board on that angle....

    I was thinking that while Amazon does have a horse in the publishing arm race, they have a horse in another race as well. That's their overall desire to sell books.

    Amazon takes a cut of every book they sell, no matter who produces it. And books aren't really in competition with one another. It's not as if you're buying a washing machine or a car. You like three books, you'll buy three books. You like ten books, you'll buy ten books. Amazon wants to sell books no matter who actually produces them, and it's in their best interests to make you want to buy as many as possible. It does Amazon no good to have tons of good books sitting on their database that don't sell—which is the factor that might inspire them to alter the present model a bit.

    Of course Amazon reviewers would need to build trust. They'd build it by doing honest reviews. If you read a glowing review and then discover the book is actually crap, you're not going to trust that reviewer any more. Or if you notice that most of the books being reviewed are produced by Amazon's own publishing arm, you'd begin to be suspicious. It would be in Amazon's best interests to do honest reviews of self-pubbed books from all sources as long as they sell books from all sources. At the moment, self-pubbed are losing out to traditional pubs because of the promotional angle, no matter who produces them. This is one way to bridge that gap.

    I'd say it would NOT be in Amazon's best interests to give books a negative review. So they would probably want to devise a system where the bad books don't get reviewed at all (except via the present system.) It's not a perfect solution, because people might begin to assume that if a self-pubbed book doesn't get an Amazon review, it must be bad. But it's a start. As I said earlier, I'd dispense with the rating system. The review would not rate the book. It would do like magazine reviews do, and simply talk about the book in a persuasive way.

    As @123456789 pointed out in his excellent comment above, self-pubbing and selling books online is a new industry. As such, there is still a lot of room for evolution. I've chosen the 'review' angle because I do buy books (lots of them) based on reviews I read in magazines and newspapers. They alert me to books I didn't know existed, and I trust the reviewers. It's the reviews themselves that are a feature of the paper/magazine, and one of the inducements to buy it every day/week/month. (And no, every new book does not get a review in each publication. They select the ones they want to review.)

    A good review is more than a vote, filled with fulsome praise. It needs to persuade the reader that the book will be worth buying. Doing that requires analysis that hangs together. It also requires trust that the reviewer is being honest because their reputation as a reviewer is on the line. I think it can be done, but it will require professional, named reviewers, like the magazines use. It wouldn't be the total answer to the problem, of course, but it's a start.

    As a person who plans to self-pub, and who has just bought and read several really good self-pubbed books, I'm in favour of trying this approach. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. But if it does, it might make self-pubbing less of a difficult prospect (and more lucrative) for those of us who want to try it.
     
    Last edited: Sep 18, 2017
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  4. Catrin Lewis

    Catrin Lewis Contributor Contributor Contest Winner 2023 Community Volunteer

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    I read that the editor who finally advocated for his house to take on HP took the ms home to his pre-teen daughter, who read it and loved it. Maybe JKR had edited out the White Room opening chapter by then, or maybe the kid didn't know she wasn't supposed to like writing like that. In the end, HP sold because of the story.
     
  5. BayView

    BayView Huh. Interesting. Contributor

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    The problem is that a lot of self-publishers don't want honest reviews. A lot of self-publishers are producing books that are very unlikely to get favourable reviews from anyone but friends and family and paid shills. They may or may not know they're producing weak work, but most objective reviewers will agree that they are.

    So, yes, there's a temptation for authors who are producing better work to want to set themselves apart from the other self-publishers, but most attempts to do that will fall back into the same "gatekeeper" issues that many self-publishers are trying to avoid.

    I love the idea of self-publishing, of a marketplace without central control. But the practice isn't working too well for me as a reader.
     
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  6. jannert

    jannert Retired Mod Supporter Contributor

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    No, it's not working well for me either. That's why I'm trying to think up ways to improve it. I don't think there will be a 100% solution, just as there is no guarantee that a traditionally published book will be 'good.' However, a traditionally-published book usually goes through a process that removes most of the glaring mistakes, etc. And they get promoted (to a certain extent, although the promotions don't last forever.)

    It's that quality gap I feel is hurting self-pubbed books. (And it DOES hurt ...yikes. Some of them are awful and basically unreadable.) The only way around this issue that I can see (at the moment) is a review process that sifts the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. I'm open to other ideas. I'm certainly open to being judged on quality of reading experience. However, nobody is going to judge my book if they don't even know it's there.

    I'm not open to the idea that the only way forward is to forget self-publishing, however. I think it's a new field and there are lots of ways it can go.

    Just an idea. A person submitting a book to Amazon to be published can tick a box saying they want to put their book up for review. That way if they are frightened of reviews they won't get one. Even if they do, they still might not get picked. Yes, there are 'gatekeepers' in that sense. But they won't be rejecting books because they're 'not a good fit for us' or 'too long,' etc. They'll need to take the books for what they are. Or that's my plan, anyway.

    I just read @Lew McIntyre's excellent book The Eagle and the Dragon for the third time. (Yeah, I think it's that good!) This historical novel came in at over 200,000 words (correct me if I'm wrong, Lew) after being very heavily edited. There is no way that book would have got past the gatekeepers for traditional publishing as a first-time author, as he would have needed to list the word count with the query letter.

    It's self-pubbed books like this that I want to see reviewed and read.
     
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  7. 123456789

    123456789 Contributor Contributor

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    I was under the impression there were a ton of English college degrees and not enough jobs. Amazon is already starting cleaning services. Maybe they could hook up self publisher up with reasonably priced editing services. Editors are a good thing. You certainly don't want to cut them out of the new publishing process.
     
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  8. Lew

    Lew Contributor Contributor

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    aw, thanks, @jannert, you were one of my best beta readers! And you make good haggis and serve good scotch!

    I think self-publishing can be made to work, but you have to set high standards, you need to have a team of experts review your book for a lot of different aspects. I had Dr Nicholas Sims-Williams review my book specifically for accuracy in portraying ancient Bactria, and he read the whole thing for general period accuracy. I had about 40 other beta readers, including @jannert. It took about 18 months from finish in 2015, to publication in 2017, including seven major revisions, one professional edit, and some SPaG still slipped through which Jan caught: "dolphins doing slow roles" alongside the ship. Fortunately, one of the good thing about print on demand is that you can fix those things, without having to dispose of a pile of already-printed stuff.

    My big challenge is marketing, which is time-consuming, expensive, and unpredictable. After my second best months in August, sales fell flat in September... two hurricanes displacing millions? People going back to school? Who knows. Perhaps my presentation and book sales at the Historical Writers of America will put some life back in my sales.

    I agree that the quality gap is real, and often terrible, not only among self-published authors but those who go to small houses. Some of these "houses" are just people who make themselves in an LLC and put other people's books up on Amazon without much checking, I guess for some fee. A small trad house I know was not much better (thank God they turned me down... too much sex and profanity), omitting in a friend's book a space before every quote embedded in a sentence, which caused the quote mark to reverse.
     
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  9. jannert

    jannert Retired Mod Supporter Contributor

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    Cleaning services? Jumpin JP. They really are focused on world domination, aren't they? :eek:
     
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  10. 123456789

    123456789 Contributor Contributor

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    Better to dominate the world with efficient shipping, low priced cleaning services, and instantaneous book delivery than fake news and cops that shoot at anything with a pulse, don't you think? :)
     
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  11. jannert

    jannert Retired Mod Supporter Contributor

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    The jury is out... :)
     
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  12. Edward M. Grant

    Edward M. Grant Contributor Contributor

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    Problem is, one person's chaff is another person's wheat. Yes, there certainly are unreadable self-published books. But there's also James Joyce. He wouldn't be let through the chaff filter.

    And, to be honest, I don't find many unreadable self-published books these days, aside from the scam books that are used to suck money out of Amazon's subscription service. Hardly anyone buys the unreadable books, so they disappear down into the multi-million rankings, where no-one will ever see them if they don't go looking.

    For me, mediocre books are a much bigger problem: particularly the ones that start well, but lose my interest by half-way through.
     
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  13. Edward M. Grant

    Edward M. Grant Contributor Contributor

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    Most of them say they don't. But they're not likely to turn down a good book if it's submitted to them the correct way.

    I remember a well-established trade-published writer saying a few years ago that he never understood why, when he went to a writing convention, the unpublished writers would all be lining up to talk to agents, and not to editors. Because he dropped his agent years before and just went direct to the publishers that 'don't accept unagented submissions.'
     
  14. Homer Potvin

    Homer Potvin A tombstone hand and a graveyard mind Staff Supporter Contributor

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    The smaller publishers do. Agents go where the money is, and the big deals get harder to find beyond the Big Five.
     
  15. ChickenFreak

    ChickenFreak Contributor Contributor

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    If they don't accept un-agented submissions, then how is it going to be submitted to them the correct way without an agent?
     
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  16. jannert

    jannert Retired Mod Supporter Contributor

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    I doubt if James Joyce would make it through the traditional publishing route today either. I suspect he'd struggle. Ullysses would get dumped immediately due to length—at the query letter stage. As would The Dubliners. Nope. Too long. Topic not 'a good fit for us.' Next.

    These are suggestions I'm making to help get self-pubbed books noticed by potential readers, and I'm kind of surprised that so many people automatically assume that professional reviews are a non-starter. It's a time-honoured way for new traditional books get 'noticed' via professionally-written reviews in magazines and newspapers. And no, the publishers don't pay the reviewers or take backhanders from the authors. The newspaper or magazine pays the reviewer, whose reputation gets built on the reliability of the reviews. Wheat, chaff, what have you. People buy the magazines and newspapers, in part, to read the reviews. Just like movie magazines and newspapers do reviews of movies. They're not paid by Hollywood directors and actors to do the reviews. They are paid by the magazine. This is not rocket science.

    I'm not trying to say the system would be foolproof. But right now, that system doesn't even exist. Self-pubbed books don't get reviewed by professional reviewers anywhere I know of. (If they do, please let me know.)

    I can't see it would do any harm to try, eh?
     
    Last edited: Sep 18, 2017
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  17. Homer Potvin

    Homer Potvin A tombstone hand and a graveyard mind Staff Supporter Contributor

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    The same way authors query agents. The publishers have submission editors that accept queries, sample chapters, or whatever according to their guidelines.

    https://lessthanthreepress.com/submissions.php#gen

    I picked @Laurin Kelly publisher because she submitted her book without an agent (I think). They're closed for submissions now, but you get the idea. There's a bunch of smaller sci-fi and fantasy pubs that have similar guidelines.
     
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  18. isaac223

    isaac223 Senior Member

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    This is inarguably the most disillusioning thread I've ever read on this site. :(
     
  19. ChickenFreak

    ChickenFreak Contributor Contributor

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    This subthread of the conversation was, as I understood it, about publishers that don't accept un-agented submissions.
     
  20. ChickenFreak

    ChickenFreak Contributor Contributor

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    I'm really not seeing why.

    Publishing is a business, not a literary contest. But that doesn't mean that quality doesn't matter. It doesn't mean that there aren't countless great books that get published.
     
  21. Edward M. Grant

    Edward M. Grant Contributor Contributor

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    There are few, if any, publishers who'll reject a good book that turns up on an editor's desk in a professional package just because the writer doesn't have an agent. It's not like movie-making, where most people are scared of even opening an unsolicited script in case the writer then sues them for plagiarism when they release a similar movie.
     
  22. Homer Potvin

    Homer Potvin A tombstone hand and a graveyard mind Staff Supporter Contributor

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    I think I missed something... hang on.
     
  23. ChickenFreak

    ChickenFreak Contributor Contributor

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    Do you have a source for that concept? Because I doubt that we're talking about one surprising stray manuscript. I suspect that we're talking about hundreds.
     
  24. isaac223

    isaac223 Senior Member

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    It just makes the writing world seem a bit colder and harsher than I once thought.
     
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  25. Laurin Kelly

    Laurin Kelly Contributor Contributor

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    Nope, never had an agent and probably never will. None of the small romance publishing houses I would submit to require an agent. Even Carina Press, which is owned by Harlequin which is owned by Harper Collins accepts unagented manuscripts.

    https://carinapress.com/blog/submission-guidelines
     
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