But those don’t automatically make a book bad. People are obviously buying them, so they like what’s there. There is no “objective” when it comes to the quality of a story – there’s just consensus. You can point out all the bad dialog and derivative elements you want, but they can be overcome by other factors. Many readers don’t even care about them.
Like others have said: Even if you hate the quality of the books the publishers put out, they are far better than the ones they rejected.
Of course. You have to find the right editor. And publishable books are rejected even though the editor knows their good, because of many factors. But ultimately the main reason why books are turned down by major publishers is that they’re not good enough. This is bruising to the ego, I know, but it’s not the publisher fault for not accepting unpublishable work.
I have it on good authority that what publishers look for these days is (1) a platform (2) good story and (3) good writing. At least two of these, preferably all three, but the most important is (1). How many books they think they can sell is mostly dependent on that, and that’s the business they are in. The bigger the publisher, the more books they hope to sell.
Smaller publishers can get into niches. They won’t have the big print runs, and they won’t have the big profits, but they can still put good work out there, or anyway, work that sells.
For a long time Berkley Prime Crime published mass market paperback cozies, of those sort that I call “cat cover cozies” or “dog cover cozies”–a bad pun as the title, and usually some recipes inside. They were reliably mediocre, improbable, unrealistic, and predictable, and they had a huge readership. Apparently the readership has declined, so now if you have a cat-cover cozy mystery you’ll have to self-publish it or shop it to Kensington.
Now the Prime Crime readers may or may not have known who the publisher was–I’m betting most of them did–but Barnes & Noble sure did, and independent bookstores sure did, and those bookstores would buy a book by a previously unknown author of that imprint because of the brand. This is just one example of how a lot of the marketing work was done by the publisher instead of the author.
And like I’ve said, that’s not always true. Things get rejected for a variety of reasons, and the books that actually get read almost always have agents representing them, which is a filter in and of itself, but not one put in place by the publishers. It’s true, the fact that agents have to submit the manuscripts does add a floor to the quality, but it in no way means that books that are well written enough to sell big will be the ones to make it through. Agents can sometimes provide good editors, but they also are lured by marketability and may ignore a really shitty plot and bad dialogue and wooden characters if they think it looks enough like Clancy or GRR Martin to sell a few tens of thousands of copies.
The ego has nothing to do with it.
And neither does your straw man argument about the publisher “not accepting unpublishable work.” The question isn’t whether they accept unpublishable work, it’s whether they publish utter shit because they think it will easier to market and fits specifically into a profitable niche.
Well, you should be very happy: they don’t publish utter shit because it’s easier to market and fits into a niche. Utter shit can’t be sold to anyone. They publish the best possible work that fits into those niches. Just because you don’t like that niche doesn’t mean their publishing shit.
Your argument continues to be “I don’t like those books, so they must be shit” (I’m curious about how much of these books you’ve actually read in order to form an opinion.*) You, however, do not dictate what readers think is quality. Ultimately, publishers are publishing the best of what they see in each genre – and the books are all good, just in ways you refuse to acknowlege.
*Many years ago, I happened to read an paranormal romance. It was far better than I ever would have imagined.
You make so many assumptions based on nothing. I wouldn’t buy a book and attempt to read it if it were not in a genre or style that I like to read. You are reaching very broadly to try to support your argument, which should give you some pause regarding the strength of your argument. I am not condemning books based on their genre. I have bought numerous books over the years, particularly in the days before it became easier to look up reviews on the internet on my phone, in genres that I follow and enjoy only to find myself throwing the book down in disgust because of horrible writing. I know I know you don’t believe that bad writing actually exists.
There are about 300,000 books released in the U.S. each year. Saying that a couple of people became famous says nothing about the publishing industry.
Publishing includes lots of types of books. Fiction and nonfiction are almost entirely separate categories. Fiction alone is broken into a number of subcategories. Literary fiction, bestseller fiction, genre fiction, Christian fiction, and young adult fiction are each subject to different standards, different methods of sale and marketing, different levels of self-publishing, different organizations within large publishing conglomerates, and different specialty publishers. Nonfiction trade books are not the same as cookbooks, academic books, manuals, celebrity books, or a dozen other subcategories. Children’s books are their own thing.
Your comments indicate that you may read one type of fiction. Well, good, anybody who reads a lot of anything needs commending. But that doesn’t mean you know anything at all about publishing other types of books. To be honest, if you are only a reader and don’t spend time researching the publishing industry your opinions mean as little as somebody who eats at McDonald’s commenting on the agricultural industry.
Utter shit is not normally marketed by publishers. Full stop. It does not matter than you read a book or five of them you considered utter shit. Your opinion is worthless. You can foist it upon us as many times as you want - that’s what the Internet is for - but nobody will pay attention because you’ve demonstrated you don’t know the subject well enough for us to take seriously. Have you spent years reading as many failed submissions as you’ve read novels? Probably not. Then you don’t know what utter shit even is, let alone whether the industry prints it as a regular matter.
If you can’t be trusted to understand the publishing history of your infinitesimally tiny niche of the 300,000 books published every year, why should we pay more attention to your pronouncements on the rest of the spectrum? We shouldn’t. I certainly don’t. They are simply bad nonfiction.
You very clearly don’t interact regularly with actual publishers. Like the kind that work for large international publishing houses and have their own imprints, edit award winning books, and discover and develop brilliant new talent. Because that IS their job!
Because if you did you’d know that those people deeply and dearly love books, authors, stories. And when they fight to publish a work, (and it is a fight! All books compete with others to get chosen!), it’s because they’ve fallen in love with it. They believe in it passionately, and that it deserves to be heard. When they come upon something awesome they are like true believers. And honestly feel a burning need to bring this book to the world.
Your perception sounds entirely like someone who’s assuming how it must work, without any actual experience moving among such people. Your perception is very much inaccurate, I’m afraid.
Speaking as a man whose bizarre and varied professional career includes 20 years as an influential and hard-dicked book editor, “word of mouth is the most dependable way to make a book successful” is what you say to an author when you know the the marketing department has no intention of spending any money pushing his title.
It’s not a couple people. Straw man. I could name 4-5 off the top of my head, with no research, in just one genre. There are many more in other genres.
Nope, that would be a baseless assumption on your part not taken from anything I said.
No, it’s not the case for all titles. The big names, the writers who get the huge advances, also get huge marketing budgets. Writers who get small advances not only get next to no marketing but get a very short leash with respect to how long their books wind up actually staying in stores (on the main shelves and not in the bargain bins).
True also. So, Exapno, just insist on a huge advance for your next manuscript and you too will enter the glamorous world of Big Publishing.
This doesn’t always work. I would get clearance to offer enormous advances for name authors who gave me brilliant manuscripts and then be told that there was no promotion money for their books because the boss had gotten drunk and horny at a cocktail party and given a million dollars to a 24-year-old blonde who had a “book idea.” And of course the entire promotion budget had to go to her book.
And, looking at RikWriter’s web site (linked in his profile, so no doxxing) I think I’ve found the source of his anger and bitterness about which books the big publishers don’t publish.
Hmm, I am surprised the history and reputation of publishers back in the day hasn’t been discussed more in this thread.
Fenris’s post about genre publishers is a great example, but back in the day, this was true of the Literature publishers. Scribners with their Editor of Genius, Max Perkins, was a prestige publisher, with Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe and so many others. Since the 60’s or so, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux has been a prestige imprimatur that, when featured in a press release, added a certain luster. Random House hit big in the 30’s when they published Ulysses in '34 after its ban was overruled. In the UK, Penguin, Jonathan Cape, The Oxford University Press and so many others have their specific connotations. Vintage was the publisher of the 80’s and is a stalwart label today. Olympia and Grove were known for a lot of trash but some great, brilliant, important free-speech types of books, like Lolita or The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
These days, there is so much froth from self-publishing and ubiquitous access that I have no clue if that type of connotation/reputation aspect matters much. I suspect it does in the upper tiers, in a literary snobbishness sorta way ;).
WordMan: Excellent post. We lost James Ellroy to Knopf back in the early 1990s because he wanted the prestige of publishing with the same house as Hammett, Chandler, and Cain. Can’t say as I blame him. The real benefit was that suddenly the New York Times Book Review and other lace-curtain critical publications started treating him as a Serious Novelist.
No, in fact, there is no anger and bitterness to find.
Maybe there was 15 years ago, but the fact is, I’ve made enough money from my writing that I wouldn’t take a publishing contract because I know for a fact that I’d make less that way. But thanks for doxxing—and yes, you are and you know it.
If you want to know my background, I had a literary agent (a pretty good one) back in the late 90s and shopped the two SF novels I had written around and couldn’t get a contract. I wasn’t bitter, just kind of resigned. I put them away and didn’t write much else for a long time. Then someone told me I should put them on Amazon and sell them myself as e-books. In my youth, self-publishing meant vanity publishing and it carried with it both a stink of desperation and a huge label of “sucker!” since you sank your own money into it and never got it back. But this was free, so I slapped half-assed covers together on Photoshop and put the two books out for 99 cents each, on the theory that at least someone besides my agent and my immediate family might read them.
I sold 30,000 copies the first year, with no advertising or marketing whatsoever, and no funds of my own invested at all.
I’ve written seven more books since then, had one that was an Amazon bestseller for a few weeks in its category and honestly, I’ve made more in the last three months from writing than I ever have in any year from any other job.
So no, I’m neither angry nor bitter.
What getting seriously into indie publishing has done for me, though, is helped me to develop a network of friends and acquaintances who are both self-published and traditionally published, and given me access to their experiences.
That’s why I know what I’m saying is accurate and all the eye-rolling, condescending bullshit that a few people like to throw around doesn’t affect that confidence.
You have got to be fucking kidding me. Click on your username and there is a link “Visit RikWriter’s homepage!”. On that web site, there is a tab for your book covers. If you conciser that to be doxxing, you really need to edit your public profile.