Gatekeepers mean nothing but control of extruded fiction product. Are you shocked that most self-published stuff is crap? Why do you ignore the fact that most publisher crap is crap, too. Sturgeon’s Law, which merely rephrases the Bell Curve. Publishers are corporate entities that flatten and try to control for their own profit everything they touch. There is no reason their offerings are “better” except in terms of marketing.
There is no reason a self-published book cannot be copyedited, professionally written and presented, and every bit as good as some exploited, manhandled publisher’s extruded fiction product. Wake up. Seriously, think a half minute and you’ll see.
And cost is an issue, too. Publishers have driven up book costs, inevitably, due to overhead costs for them, and greed. How can this affect the writing? Seems to me it would bland it out and make it Lowest Common Denominator to reach as wide an audience as possible. Who do you think established the rule of thumb that best sellers should be written at a 4th to 6th grade level?
So is a free or low-cost ebook worse in content? Does it make content higher quality because some NY publisher decides to slap a $35 price tag on the latest mastubatory drivel from some academic-anointed literary moron? Or is that higher price just about paying paper, ink, staff, shipping, storage, warehousing, and retail shelf space costs?
And how much of that outrageous cost for one of the NY publishers’ books goes to the writers? 10 – 20%. That’s ridiculous when a writer can epublish and get 100% of the returns. If that writer invests in producing a good book well presented in the first place, by paying editors and copy editors and book packagers and so on, the quality will show, and no need for middlemen taking a cut at every stage.
Good writing is not dependent on or even relevant to the delivery system. Reading a paper book is not better or worse, has no effect on, the quality of the words, which can also be read electronically, listened to, etc.
So let’s all stop bashing ebooks and the electronic revolution that is returning writing to the writers, and stop defending these middlemen peddlers and merchants who are largely responsible for flattening writing into a homogenous pabulum.
Write what you want as you want it to be and show it to the world. We don’t have a piracy problem, we have an obscurity problem. Break through. If something is so popular its being pirated, guaranteed you can make money.
–25 April 2012 10:01 / ERS
