Oh sure, great "vetting process": The brother-in-law living on Flatbush Ave and working days in the mail room gets published, while the genius working in a cabin in Maine is told "Its not long enough. Rewrite it completely and add five hundred pages and we'll reconsider it." And Down Maine has no idea whether the publisher has even really read the book or not. Publishing for decades now is all about selling paper. When you get a review on an e-book, you know it's about your story, and you know, good or bad, right or wrong, the reviewer read it and felt strongly enough about it to want to make a comment.
Patrick King
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of course we all rely mostly on recommendations from friends and trusted reviewers and fellow rara-avians and the like but the point is that virtually all of the books recommended by those folks have already been published by a publisher - that is, they have been through an initial vetting process
without that initial publisher sorting I assure you that you will be exposed to many thousands, nay millions or billions, of examples of writing far more horrible than Dan Brown on his worst day
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>How about the readers doing the sorting? Frankly, even now I rely more on readers' comments and the stuff I read from you guys when I choose a book I haven't read. Because Doubleday publishes something you think I'm going to just run out and buy it? Their track record isn't that good.
Patrick King
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>I wouldn't worry about the future ... where rubbish is being published.
After all, "real" publishers actually print the works of Dan Brown!
The future has already arrived.
(Did I really say that out loud?) ;)
Steve
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yes- everyone and his or her brother and sister could directly publish their e-book to Amazon but who would sort the wheat from the chaff?
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