I think that what gets published is a very mixed bag, with an
overwhelming preponderance of bad stuff, some of which is
competently written but still bad and some of which is just
plain bad, actively bad. As to what gets rejected, my guess
is that most of it is just plain bad, too. A well known
writer writes a bad novel and it may get published anyway; a
new writer submits the same novel and everyone will reject
it.
Somehow we have to uncouple critical judgments from the
commercial side of things, which is not and never has been
fair. It is possible (there are examples) that a very good,
even a brilliant book be rejected by so many publishers that,
if it does get published by somene, one can only attribute it
to luck. It could just as well have remained unpublished had
a few circumstances been different (the writer does not
persist, forgets about the whole thing, gets busy doing
something else, etc.).
To summarize, I do not think that unpublished novels should
always be left unpublished, only the bad ones. And a lot of
published novels should not have been published (critically
speaking, though the author is glad it was published and
hopefully made some dough, which I do not begrudge
him).
Best,
MrT
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 17 May 2007 EDT