Idea cite cite cite publish move on...

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

This is a borderline pit but not quite, so I’ll put it here.

I read a lot of books in the spectrum of specialized topics aimed at an intelligent general audience - not quite pop but closer to pop than professional. Many of these are quite good, especially most history books written to a nonprofessional audience.

Then there’s the category described by the subject line: a Writer who Writes for a living finds a subject, spends some shortish time researching it, then writes a book that is basically one cited paragraph after another, with about as little original thought, shaping and content as can be managed. (Then he or she moves on to new Idea; lather, rinse, repeat.)

Now, as some who has Writer on his resume and has written on a wide variety of subjects, I know how it’s done. For commercial clients in particular, I’ve done pretty much the above: take idea, gather info, write book based on that gathered info, collect check, move on. However, these are typically privately-published works, much like book-length white papers or manuals, and it’s pretty much how they’re done.

But the works of mine that are out there on Amazon and ABE are on topic I found important, represent years of individual research, and are written in my voice with considerable thought, shaping and input from me, no matter how much material I might quote, cite or otherwise base the book upon.

So I have to sigh at the latest stack of reading (on marketing and branding) that on first skim is worst-of-the-worst in what I’m talking about. They have catchy titles, lurid jacket copy and the inevitable promise to blow the lid off that slimy marketing industry’s deepest secrets. Then they go on for just enough compact, magazine-article chapters to hold the covers $24.95 apart… paragraph after paragraph virtually quoted from abstracts, probably less than 10% anything like original writing and with hardly anything but “fill in the outline” analysis and development. In the end, it’s mental cotton candy akin to browsing Google for a few top-level hits on each subtopic. The concept, title and presentation promise intellectual value; the formula of “shovel in cites” delivers vapid factoidism.

Then they move on to another such project in which they have as little actual interest, investment, understanding or passion… just the next topic on the list some publisher said they would buy two covers-full of.

Fuck 'em all. Poseurs and pretenders.

2

I recently read a book called “Wellbeing” for a book club that was basically exactly what you describe. No overarching narrative, no personal voice of the author, no originality. On top of that, there was a lot of correlation-is-not-causation issues. You are more likely to smoke if your friends-of-friends smoke–and that proves what, exactly? It was irksome.

I get a lot more out of health books written by researchers in the field–cardiac researchers who write books on how to prevent heart disease, for example, or endocrinologists writing popular books about diabetes.

3

My brother has been complaining about this, looking through cookbooks that are self-published on Amazon. Basically, a person will come up with an idea like “40 Cookie Recipes”, find 40 random cookie recipes on the internet, slap them together with some photos from Shutterstock, and sell it. Different recipes will use different systems of measurement, there’s no order behind the ordering or contents, lots of typos, etc.

That’s annoying enough as it is. But once you start getting into books like, “40 Cookie Recipes for Diabetics”, if the person doing the writing isn’t really vetting their content (as it appears they probably aren’t), then harmful medical advice is getting published.

I suppose that this is the downside of bypassing the publishing and editor industries.

4

Well, at least there’s cites. So that’s sort of something.

5

Yeah, those annoy me too. I found a cookbook for Kindle once that had “healthy recipes” in the title whose contents had zip-all to do with health. We’re talking stuff like ham-and-mayonnaise “salads”–there was clearly no filtering whatsoever. I think the person must have googled “salad recipes” or something and then just cut-and-pasted everything they found and slapped on a “Healthy Recipes: Salad!” for the title. (Not the actual title–can’t remember exactly how it was phrased.)

Related question, sort of: why are so many of these low-quality ebooks free? Sometimes it’s obvious that they are really there to promote a product (a vegetable peeler, Cool-Whip, etc.), but sometimes they don’t seem to be centered around a certain product at all.