Thread: Published books / Being a reader vs Being a writer

Originally Posted by Gamer_2k4

I would say that's a terrible thing. High barriers to entry mean (ideally) only the best novels make it through. If any scrub can get a book published, you're going to have to wade through the garbage to get to the legitimately good works.

That'll be why whenever I look at the Horror shelf at the local bookstore it's full of 'Sparkly Vampire' and 'Oscar Wilde, Vampire Hunter' novels. God forbid if anyone but a major publisher was allowed to sell books there.

And imagine if Youtube let anyone upload any old crap so you had to wade through a million dancing cat videos to find something that's worth watching.

Less sarcastically, I'd agree that most of the self-published books I've read are bad, but they're also somewhere down in the 500,000+ sales rank range where few people ever see them. The difference is that that I can find self-published horror novels which aren't part of 'latest big trend X' because the publishers aren't all looking for books that are 'just like Twilight only different'.

I think the key word was "ideally". Certainly having professional editors going over one's work will produce much, much better results than having your best friend do it. But no, not all editors are good. Not all commercially published books are written well. However, liking or disliking "Sparkly Vampires" is subjective and has nothing to do with the quality of the writing. There are a lot of poorly written books (by both types of publishers) that are doing very well sales-wise; there are a lot of well-written books that gather dust on the store shelves. Readers don't always want Tolstoy. Sometimes they just want sparkly.