How do so many crappy novels get published?

Cafe Society
21

So, again, not a new issue for readers. And not just for women, I remember (quasi-fondly) all of the “Men’s Adventure” novels I read as a mid-teen. Things like Axler’s “Deathlands” and the like. Post apocalyptic violence porn interspaced with periodic explicit sex scenes. And a release rate of at least one a year or so. There are also all the Executioner Series which was a montly (!!!) paperback short novel that ran from 1969 - 2020 with over 400 books in the series. The first dozen and a half were written by a single author, and then the rights were sold off and the publisher had ghostwriters turn them out.

All these (and many, many others) were just as formulaic as any romance novel, and are as @Lumpy describes, cheap, disposable fast food of reading. I often found the Deathlands novels in my favorite used book store in the $.99 bin, and I’d pick up a half dozen for a weeks binge reading.

And for a slightly more juvenile read, the 80s/90s boom of cheap TSR branded novels in the vastly expanded Dragonlance/Forgotten Realms/Ravenloft settings was similarly formulaic, but generally less explicit sexually. Still, I remember reading them fondly, and a few were much better novels than the source material justified.

And we won’t even start on the sheer number of Star Trek and Star Wars novels that were released. Sure, a few were written by skilled authors (Splinter of the Mind’s Eye by Foster comes to mind), but they were legion with many a stinker among them.

TL;DR - cheap and cheerful is enough as long as there’s an audience that keeps coming back for more. And there is. And we’re often part of it. :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

22

Genre fiction also increasingly has covers that signal the genre. A nice set is at

Not all the same genre, but many are in similar genres.

ETA. Also amusing

23

Wow. Those book covers do look remarkably similar.

24

I’ve seen some library and store displays of chick lit where it’s very hard to tell them apart. Same palette, type style, graphic design, and content.

ETA:

25

larry needs to restart the burglar series … or at least one where bernie finally gets a real girlfriend and gets to live happy ever after …

yes especially in the 50-80s it was more find a husband to make a family wish-fulfillment just with what passed for middle age excitement

Now in the 80s thanks to the rise of sexy day and night time soap operas and a new competitor Silhouette they became more fantasy-based and explicit over the years to the point where it turned off the old fans … Nowadays they have so many genre ones … a neighbor lady was telling me that they even have a “dark” romance series with vampires werewolves and the like

Ironically after becoming their competition harlequin bought out shillouette back in the 00s and they still keep them as separate lines

26

I’m not familiar with that specific book, but I can say that Lisa Scottoline is an established author with a decent reputation. I’ve read a number of her books and while she is not one of my favorites, I thought her writing ability was good.

Based on that, I’m guessing that either “One Perfect Lie” is one of her lesser works and it got published because she has a good track record, or it’s actually not that bad a book (according to many readers), and just really didn’t appeal to you.

27

actually, @Infovore can answer this as shes a sci-fi writer that’s even written books based on FASA’s Shadowrun and Mechwarrior

28

This thread reminds me of this one I posted way back in April. The books in question in my thread are absolute rubbish, with horrid English, and the writing practically reeks of pretentiousness. The (currently) last post in that thread is by MrAtoz sums up the situation:

I’m just expressing surprise at how many authors I’ve been running across lately that seem to be succeeding (for certain values of “success”) despite not composing very readable prose.

There’s a lot of rubbish, and evidently a lot of people who like rubbish.

29

I’m actually an urban fantasy writer, and I’ve written stuff based on Shadowrun but not Mechwarrior. I’m much more familiar with the indie world than the traditional-publishing one. But my answer to the question is that it gets published because people buy it. The big publishers only publish what they think they can sell, which leaves a lot of genres (including urban fantasy) largely to indie writers like me. As others in this thread have said, there are a whole lot of people out there who want their books to entertain them, and aren’t looking for any deep literary merit. And that’s okay. Some of these folks don’t even care if the book is well edited or even well written; if it hits the tropes they’re looking for, they’re happy. That’s okay too, IMO. Who am I to judge what speaks to someone else?

It gets a little murkier with self-published works, because there’s no gatekeeper except for the readers. There are a lot of bad self-published books out there, but there are also a lot of really good ones (especially in the genres the big publishers don’t want to publish). Indie romance authors make money hand over fist because their readers devour anything they can get their hands on. Romance readers are insatiable. I think thrillers and mysteries (especially cozies) fall into this category too. As long as the story is entertaining, the readers will read it. Kindle Unlimited is a huge help with this, since folks can borrow books, read them, and return them, and the author gets paid for page reads. I personally know at least a few indie authors who make six figures a month. I had lunch with one of them at the food court at the 20Books conference last month. He writes urban fantasy and cozy mysteries. I’m in awe of his work ethic, honestly.

Don’t know if this actually answers the question, but I hope it provides a little more insight. BTW, I have developed a huge respect for romance authors since I became an indie. I can’t write it (I wish I could!) and I don’t enjoy reading it, but those folks work hard and they have tons of fans who dig what they’re putting out.

As a side note, there’s a reason all the covers look alike, and it’s because every genre has particular conventions that readers look for. If the book looks too different from the others in its genre, it won’t sell well. For example, in my own genre, readers expect the main character and some kind of magic effect. Romance readers want a couple (for clean romance) or a shirtless guy (for the spicier variety). Traditional publishers can get away with some variation because they can put more money into marketing the books, but indies tend to cluster around the same tropes.

As another side note, it’s possible to be a “New York Times Bestselling Author” without having a bestselling novel. There are entire businesses centered around publishing anthologies where they charge a (usually pretty hefty) fee to be part of it and then market the heck out of it to get it on the list. It’s more common for USA Today than NYT, though.

30

I can imagine the former, but seriously question the latter.

If I cared to put in the effort, I could have pointed out countless things that qualified it as “not good” writing. But here, I’ll offer no more than the climactic scene where the undercover ATF agent has the helicopter pilot lower a ladder which he climbs down and hangs from his knees to grab the teenager from a truck carrying a bomb, which then drives over the side of the bridge and explodes underwater. :roll_eyes: But that ridiculous resolution had nothing to do with the lousy character development, awkward transitions, stilted and hackneyed dialogue and relationships…

For someone to say this was not poorly written, they must not know or be able to comprehend what good (or even decent) writing is.

31

Dan Brown writes best-selling books!
To answer the OP, it’s because they sell. Do you remember the movie Mission: Impossible? People complained the plot was too hard to follow. That is your target audience.

32

I can’t count how many writers I’ve followed that eventually just run out of good ideas. But their names still sell books regardless of the decline in quality.

33

I kind of wonder if it has to do with exactly how people read. By that, I mean is it a “mental movie” or is it something more centered around the actual words on the page?

I’m a “mental movie” type- when I get into a book, I basically have a little mental movie running in my head- I’m visualizing the scenes, the dialogue, action, etc… as I’m reading it. So in many ways, the actual words on the page aren’t my focus, so long as they’re not so godawfully written that they make the “movie” pause or stutter (so to speak). Many literary sins can be forgiven if the story is engaging and flows well enough to keep the mental movie running smoothly. That said, better writers are typically able to accomplish that AND do it with style, and their “movies” are better in a lot of ways. With me, some degree of bad writing is just filled in mentally without me having to actually think about it- half-baked descriptions or undeveloped characters are just sort of filled in enough automatically so the movie works.

The flip side of that is the set of readers who are literally engaged with the writing itself, and not necessarily having that mental movie spun up in their head as they write. Readers of this sort basically are far more attuned to the actual word choice, usage, etc… and often can’t get past that, even when the story’s great. My college roommate and best friend used to get into discussions with me about various books we’d read- he’d get hung up on the literal writing, while I was talking all about the plot and story.

In movie terms, the mental movie crowd are the ones watching with popcorn because it’s a fun way to kill a couple of hours. The more literary crowd are the ones analyzing the cinematic qualities of the direction, the writing, and the acting, rather than just “letting go” and watching the movie.

And the really crappy novels? They’re basically the equivalent of made-for-TV movies- stuff like the Hallmark/Lifetime movies are a great example. They’re just as formulaic as romance novels, and for the same reasons I suspect.

34

Cool!

I bet you also wonder why people watch movies with cool, exciting action sequences that are implausible or impossible or don’t really make sense in the context of the movie. It’s because they enjoy watching cool, exciting action sequences.

When you’re wondering why something is popular even though it’s crappy, you should look, not at what’s wrong with it, but at what it does right. It’s popular because there are enough readers who like it for A, B, and C and who don’t care about, or are willing to overlook, X, Y, and Z.

35

A couple other well-regarded (or at least top-selling) authors whose novels I made the mistake of sampling (at a steep discount, thankfully) are J.A. Jance and Jeffery Deaver.

Both books, published after they’d already cranked out many volumes in an ongoing series, had badly constructed plots, wooden and unbelievable heroes/heroines, and went off on inane and inexplicable tangents. The writing was only marginally competent. And yet fans have gushed about them to the tune of five-star reviews.

Aspiring writers, take heart. If established authors can get away with submitting such dreck, there’s got to be hope for you.

36

This.

I’ve complained about this myself, and in particular about how damned near impossible it seems for me to interest an agent. I’ve had five books published, four of them by well-respected university presses. My list of published articles takes up five pages of very small type. I’ve been a contributing editor for over a decade. But I haven’t been able to interest an agent in any of my fiction or my non-fiction. I’ve been to meet-the-agent sessions. I’ve written scads of agent query letters. When I say “scads”, you should understand that I sent out more than 350 targeted letters to agents for my novel The Traveler. These were sent to agents who specialized in that form of literature – not just to 350 agents, or to 350 science fiction agents, but to ones who indicated interest in that particular niche. they were, they said, looking for that kind of book. Half of that number indicated their lack of interest by not responding at all. The other half declined, usually within two weeks, but sometimes as much as six months later.

Agents and publishers are strictly motivated by what they think will sell. There is no other criterion. A proven name – one that has produced books that have sold in the past – will be seriously looked at, even if only for that reason. Someone with what appears to be a salable series will be considered, because it implies future sales. People who have demonstrated the ability to be recognized, even in some other field (sports, politics, entertainment, people with web series, etc.), will be considered because their names are known, and that strongly suggests that their books will be bought.

All this can be extremely frustrating if you’re making that Sisyphean effort to get your book out there. Even if you’re published before (I already had two books out through Oxford University Press when I queried regarding Traveler), it won’t help if you’re not well known. I wrote my fourth book because I thought I had a Sure Thing publisher already lined up. It turned out that I didn’t – surprise! – sand I had to scramble to find someone to publish Lost Wonderland. I was lucky. I did fin one. Otherwise I’d have another completed-but-unpublished manuscript to add to my pile (yes, I have a pile of completed but unpublished books in my den, all looking for publishers)

You can look at the collected works of someone like Lionel Fanthorpe, with his 150+ published novels, all of them infinitely worse, I guarantee, than anything by Dan Brown, and despair. Or you can look at that stack of published crap and say to yourself “If he could do it, there’s nothing preventing me from doing it.”

Keep on plugging.

(If you have not yet encountered the wonder that is Fanthorpe – who wrote under many pseudonyms, by all means go here and read excerpts – https://www.peltorro.com/ His stuff makes Jim Theis’ The Eye of Argon appear to be Shakespeare by comparison. That is not a ridiculous statement. Fanthorpe sometimes seems to have used what I call the “Thesaurus method of writing”. If he needed to pad out a word count, he will suddenly throw in a list of adjectives for no good reason, as if he simply opened a thesaurus and simply wrote down the entire entry of synonyms. Not even Jim Theis would do anything as transparent as that. I’m serious.

And remember, even The Eye of Argon eventually found a publisher. But it was after it had attained recognition status. The Eye of Argon - Wikipedia)

PS – Fanthorpe is still around. And, Og help us, still writing. Garan of the Veneti was published just two years ago.

37

I’ve heard of more than one popular author who got their start when they read someone else’s book and thought “I can do better than this!” (Can’t remember for sure who, specifically, but Dan Brown may have been one of them.)

38

Different people like different things.

39

Not without a track record of successful books behind them. Being able to get crap past an editor is a privilege of the established author.

40

And he signed my copy of his (and his wife’s) book The Black Lion.