No one has challenged my above claim. Please see my post (#24579). This is what I'm primarily interested in. I want concrete examples of serious literary works of genuine quality. In case you don't want to find the post, I'll say it again here. Please give examples of self-published books that aren't: -Hunks with bare chests and titles like "Daddy's Home" -Books with subtitles like "A [insert cool guy name] thriller" -Anything remotely close to Fifty Shades of Grey -Safe supermarket fiction for 50s mothers -LITRPG -Anything with bondage on the cover -Pure YA safeness like Eragon or The Fault in our Stars
r/K strategy isn't quite a perfect analogy though. I takes years if not decades of hard work to learn art to a high level, and the same goes for music. Once you've learned those skills though, like Paul McCartney said, you can sit down and crank out a song before breakfast. And another one after if you want. But you can't do that, not to a high level, until you've put yourself through the training. That part requires K strategy.
Hm. Again, I have to stress I'm not talking about the skill level involved in the craft/pursuit itself. I'm only talking about the ease of consumption and the frequency at which a work is shared, etc. I viewed my r/K analogy purely from that viewpoint. All the popular platforms where it takes 5 minutes to upload something are the r-strategists. Edit: Not just the skill level but the length of time it takes to make, which is what you were suggesting. That's not what I was really trying to discuss.
All the time! In this case your suggestion that my r/K analogy didn't fit was, well, wrong I was talking about one thing only and you did admittedly take it in a different direction. I was only ever talking about rate of consumption and sharing, etc. etc.
Andy Weir springs to mind as a self-publisher who got picked up by a publishing house, Moose has mentioned plenty of others above. This here is the issue, though. The only place it matters is inside your head. You want the self-published equivalent of Mervyn Peake? Go write it and self-publish it, because that's how it works. Doesn't matter if it doesn't sell, it's not about the money. You want readers? You can stick it on Facebook, run an ad and get hundreds. Honestly, what it sounds like it's really about is that you want an ego stroke for your writing in a way that you don't for art or music or anything else. And that's fine! You want the validation of trad pub then go for it, there's nothing wrong with that. But don't compare it to a musician sticking up a song on Spotify no-one will ever listen to when you should be comparing it to a band being picked up by a major label. The problem isn't writing, the problem is that you're holding it to a massively higher standard.
@Teladan, I do at least agree that writing can be brutal by nature. I don't think many will deny that. Also, consider quality vs quantity. I suspect lots of people immediately forget about the images and songs they flip through on the internet. However, if they spend 12 hours reading a book that deeply impacts them, that's a lasting effect.
So, that's a no to my request? I mean, Nige, I asked you for the equivalent of Peake and you've told me to go and write it myself. I was hoping for some good examples to decimate my argument. What I've got in response to my query so far is Her Last Tomorrow which looks like something you'd see in the supermarket picked up by the most undiscerning of readers ("Could you murder your wife to save your daughter?") and Andy Weir who is, well, Andy Weir. I don't really consider ultra-popular space thrillers with swearing to be art, but that's just me! Where is the self-published equivalent of Too Loud a Solitude?
Ahem my post three posts above this one https://www.writingforums.org/threads/the-not-happy-thread.35680/page-984#post-1920550 Adam Croft, LJ Ross, Rupi Kaur. Christopher Paolini. Hugh Howey... and the list goes on Andy Weir is another one that springs to mind. (admittedly Mark Dawson does fall into the cool guy thriller - but with 4 million copies sold as he reclines on his throne made of twenty pound notes he probably isn't too bothered by your disdain for his genre)
The only validation my simple mind could ever want. I will happily be forgotten by history if it means I can end a mortgage.
You chose Christopher Paolini as an exemplary author of self-published fiction? Paolini? Also, see my comment about Adam Croft. Again, I'm not even considering money here. I'm asking for books that are the equivalent of Hrabal, etc... I'm asking for quality.
Because you haven't seen quality books self-pubbed doesn't mean it can't be done. Hell, if anything it means the market is wide open, get in there and exploit it before somebody else does!
Of course it's a no, it's a dumb request. I imagine they're out there, but they're not the kind of books I read, so no, I don't have a list I can rattle off at twenty past midnight. The problem, I will reiterate, is not that writing doesn't have platforms. It's that you've decided only one of those platforms is valid, and that problem exists between keyboard and chair. Correct, it is.
Or just continue building a castle of negativity around yourself and sit in it fuming about how unfair it all is.
Paolini got a four book deal with random house out of his self publishing... whether you like him or not is irrelevant, its a clear illustration that you were wrong when you said "I can't see random house offering self published authors book deals" Hugh Howey also got a trad deal with Simon and Schuster and a film deal being produced by Ridley flipping Scott Quality is in the eye of the beholder... your original contention was that self publishing can't be considered the equivalent of art station... are you know telling us that all the art on art station is of comparable quality to say Da Vinci ? Because you know I want quality...
It shouldn't be this difficult for people to suggest. Yes, I haven't seen any, but people here should definitely be able to instantly point to examples. Not Weir, Paolini or Croft. I'm thinking... Meyrink, Hrabal, Peake, Macdonald, Dunsany, Sabato, Fowler, Hamsun, Jackson, etc. I'm purposefully using multiple genres and styles here since I'm not just talking about one particular section of literature. @big soft moose Oh, quality is in the eye of the beholder. Everyone knows that. But someone liking something does not make that thing intrinsically good... Basic logic, no? I feel like I've had this conversation a billion times in my life. Here we go again. MacDonalds is very popular. This is because it's chunk food full of crap. People enjoy Macdonalds. Does that make Macdonalds good for them? Please answer this. Edit: I forgot the most crucial part. Dostoevsky is the salad. Paolini is the Macdonalds. If you think that's wrong, well, I can't even process such thinking.
It makes McDonalds very good at being a reliable fast food. It's good at what it's trying to do. Looking at it and complaining that it's not a fruit salad is stupid.
I'm not familiar with all those names, but I think if there are writers at the level of Dunsany or Poe today, they wouldn't have any trouble getting trad pubbed. For instance Jeff Vandermeer.
Expected response. So, because the trash fulfils its purpose as trash, that makes it morally defensible that people consume this trash? Sorry, I'm just not one of these people who, to use a different medium for a change, watches Marvel films "to be entertained." Feel free to scoff and mock. I have limited amount of time on this planet and I'm not going to waste it on nonsense. No, that's not really it at all. That's not what I've suggested. Once again, I've only been talking about the rate of consumption. I've said it multiple times now, but I'm talking about the way in which writing differs from other mediums. Self-publishing is valid. I didn't say it wasn't. I'm just saying there is not a single platform that is widely known and accepted where one can instantly "upload" a sample of writing and have it be viewed by thousands of times from a blank slate. I find I'm having to repeat myself a lot now, but to use the Arstation example again, a new account could post an incredible bit of art and it's instantly venerated. No such platform exists for writing. Blogs and Amazon don't count because 1) I'm talking about a tabula rasa situation for the creator/we're discussing third-party platforms anyway and 2) An Amazon published book will not get purchases or even a handful of views if it's a new writer. That's the last time I'm going to clarify as it's getting tedious.
I don't read literary fiction because my personal opinion is that much of it is pretentious waffle (this isnt unrelated to my father being an English teacher and making me read stuff like faust at an early age), personally i can't think of anything i want to do less than read Hrabal... does that mean that he isn't quality ? The NYT tells us that Marko Koska's Bande de Francais is a literary sensation... a nominee in the 2018 Prix Renaudot... frankly i'd rather stick pins in my scrotum than read that... but its definitely lit fic which the big paper critics all loved, and its self pub Likewise with Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur... totally not my bag, but it was an NYT best seller for 52 weeks (she now has a book deal but she got it through her massive self published success)
@Teladan You have too many variables going. When somebody answers one part of the equation you bring up another one, and I'm afraid you're never going to be able to satisfy all parts of it at once. You're setting an impossibly high standard and putting too many limitations on it and then lamenting that your imagined perfect writer's utopia doesn't already exist.
What? Xoic, I'm not... I'm not talking about that. Remember, this conversation started because I asked for self-published authors on the level of those aforementioned names. Okay. You may have got me though. Jeff Vandermeer. There's a name to be distinguished from all previous examples. Admittedly I didn't know he self-published originally.
