An interesting article by Laura Miller, NY Times Book Review contributor, over at Salon:

http://www.salon.com/books/laura_miller/index.html

I think she makes several hopeful points, especially for authors.

Views: 34

Reply to This

Replies to This Discussion

I did not read "hopeful" here. It sounded to me like your typical NY-based hatchet job against indie publishing, just with more vitriol than usual, an entertaining, yet hardly illuminating read.
She's right about slush piles. I read one regularly and 75% of the writing is awful -- the opposite of entertaining.
I'm sure she is right about slush piles, Jack. What she's wrong about IMO is what'll happen with the increasing democratization of the slush pile. The Wisdom of Crowds literature suggests that as a group the masses will be quite good at finding books that'll prove popular, and, as suggested in the new book, Drive, by Daniel Pink, there will be lots of people willing to donate their time to finding good books by unknown or little known authors. He uses Wikipedia and Linux as examples, all those gazillions of man and woman hours donated to benefit others.

About ten percent of the Amazon Kindle's top 100 paid list are indie books at the moment. (I just slipped off the list myself.) That to me shows there are plenty of readers willing to take a chance on an unknown (if the price is right, at any rate). And between the online reader reviews and word of mouth online and the samples available to download it's not too hard to tell whether a book is right for you and whether the book's any good.
I believe you. ANYONE reading this crap is not going to be entertained, so why would they buy it and encourage the author? The good stuff -- entertaining -- should definitely rise to the top.
This paragraph sums up my feeling about the self-publishing trend:

People who claim that there are readers slavering to get their hands on previously rejected books always seem to have a previously rejected book to peddle; maybe they're correct in their assessment, but they're far from impartial. Readers themselves rarely complain that there isn't enough of a selection on Amazon or in their local superstore; they're more likely to ask for help in narrowing down their choices. So for anyone who has, however briefly, played that reviled gatekeeper role, a darker question arises: What happens once the self-publishing revolution really gets going, when all of those previously rejected manuscripts hit the marketplace, en masse, in print and e-book form, swelling the ranks of 99-cent Kindle and iBook offerings by the millions? Is the public prepared to meet the slush pile?

This is why there will remain the role of gatekeeper regardless of technology.
This is exactly what they said about the web, though. That it would be a useless junk pile where nobody could find what they wanted, because it didn't have gate keepers. But guess what? It's a new model, and systems evolved very quickly to help people find exactly what they wanted. As a matter of fact, people can find what they want much better than before, because they have access to everything.

The web was like becoming a grown up - no longer did someone have to filter your choices. Indie publishing is growing up too - and pretty fast.

Amazon has been working on systems that filter the slushpile for longer than it has been working on ebooks. From the moment they started, they wanted to offer every book in the world. And to sell more of them and not overwhealm the customer, they had to develop systems to help people find what they wanted.

Outside of Amazon, there are all sorts of reviewers and communities which have been doing a much better job of getting people to the books they love than the old system ever did.
I'll agree that there was a brief moment about five years ago when the internet was useful for finding information, but that moment has passed. It is now much more like the useless junkpile everyone predicted it would be, rife with pointless bullshit. Yes, there are useful sites, but you have to know where they are, and finding any small tidbit of actual information now takes much much longer than looking it up in a book. Granted, this too may pass -- I hope it will.
Yeah it's full of junk, but it's now EASY to find exactly the right and useful information you want. That half a percent that's useful is right at your fingertips.

And frankly, I'm finding it easier and easier all the time. Google and other search engines are doing a better job all the time of pushing the spam and junk down the search results, and even if they didn't, a little savvy on how you type in your search will pop the best results to the top. (Add the word "mayo" to a search on medical stuff, for instance.) You can do serious research on primary source sites, you can do silly and trivial research. You can find ANYTHING you want in seconds.

Most web users these days are really savvy at it. Heck, my mother, who can't operate a mouse, still manages to find sources for oddball French hand lotions. I find great rare spices or teas, and research their quality and ratings and production methods and sources.

If you're interested in an author, you can find every interview they ever did (and also their home phone number, the names of their pets, and the full text of every letter they ever wrote to the editor of their hometown newspaper) in minutes.

The web is a fabulous library.
There will always be gatekeepers, including the current editors and agents, but they will be joined by amateur gate keepers, via book blogs, for example, and via sales stores. I think of the Amazon store's recommendation system as a gatekeeper, one fueled by the input and purchasing decisions of millions of readers.
I think you're right, Eric. Examples like Linux and Wikipedia show that having capital isn't the only way to get things done.

Another thing we should keep in mind is that pretty much every first novel that's ever been published has been, "a previously rejected book" - sometimes many, many times. I'm not sure about this, but my guess is publishing is like every other industry and the number of places doing business shrank ovr the last twenty years (I know for textbook pubishing there were over a dozen publishers and now there are three).

So, if it used to be possible to get a book published by the fifteenth or twentieth place it was sent but now there are only six places it seems natural something would pick up that slack.

This may be a good time for smaller, indie publishers or it may be a good time for self-publishing.
What surprises me the most are the reactions of the existing "gatekeepers" and publishers (interesting article about this in the April 26th "New Yorker" mag, too).

It's almost as if they fear a free market of ideas/writing and haven't paid any attention to what's been happening in digital and social media. Look what Facebook did for that "*$#@ my dad says." Yet they urge writers to blog, network, etc. etc. Just my opinion, of course.
Yeah, the public moved on from the need for gatekeepers a long time ago, but I don't think the gatekeepers realized it. But that's the way change works. The support structure has to be there first - and it's there, so now things are changing.

The revolution already happened, but the world didn't come to an end, so people who _believe_ the world would come to an end if it ever happened just didn't notice.

RSS

CrimeSpace Google Search

© 2024   Created by Daniel Hatadi.   Powered by

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service