Why Do Critics Ignore Certain Books?
Yesterday, I solicited feedback on the blog. Several people posted questions in the comments section, and many more have emailed me privately. The two questions I get over and over (and over) are these:
1) What can authors do to get critics to review their books?
2) Why do critics completely ignore self-published books?
I never know exactly how to answer these questions. There's the obvious: Many authors just won't get the publicity they'd like from their publishers, which means:
1) Hire your own publicists. I know a writer who actually hired three publicists for one book. The pros: it got her onto all the top radio shows, and into many magazines and newspapers. The cons: $$$$$.
2) Get active and creative with your own publicity (some do this well, others don't).
One of the problems I've ranted about several times is how books are sent to critics -- we often miss titles we might review. There's stiff competition: I bet more books get published each month than there is print space to review them in. Self-published authors have the added hurdle of self-publishing stigma: I imagine many critics don't pay attention to self published books because they figure they must suck, since no publishing house (major or minor) would publish them (am I right about this?).
What else? I hoping to hear from others on this: You critics and editors out there, what makes you pick one book to review over another? What can authors do to get your attention? And what do you really think about self published books? Why don't you review them? Do they just look amateur so you ignore them? Do you give them a shot and find that they don't hold up? What's the deal? And what could self-published authors do to change that?
posted by Rebecca Skloot 11:05:00 AM
31 Comments:
Thanks for this post. I'd like to offer the distinction here that I did in my email to you: "Self-published" books are really of two types. Vanity presses will print anything, and quality is a real issue. However, there is an emerging class of indie publishers, authors who take on all the responsibilities of publishing a book properly. They establish an imprint, pay an independent editor, hire a designer, pay a compositor, send out review copies, news releases, etc., just like any other publisher. And still these books seem to get tossed over in the corner with the vanity books. It's these indie books that I'd like to see critics look at as a category worthy of more attention.
Thanks Dick ... I think you're right that these books are being lumped with "vanity pesses." How do these indie presses handle publicity? What do they do to get their books out there? Anything other than sending them to critics?
Rebecca,
That varies from author to author. I'm sure some just stare at the pallet of books in the garage and concentrate on levitating them. But the serious ones work with publicists and marketing consultants, seek distribution deals (hard without reviews), participate in bookstore mailings, put together sell sheets and fact sheets, etc.
What they don't do, for the most part, is schmooze the power elite, because, frankly, they don't move in those circles. If they did, they would have gotten a publishing deal already.
Just for the sake of completeness, there is a third category of self-publishers outside this discussion, those who already have a public speaking career and are selling books at the back of the room. They do fine and don't need reviews particularly. But for the indies, especially the novelists, it seems they are almost always on the outside looking in.
Adding to the fray--The New York Times commonly reviews the same book numerous times--see recent coverage of Jennifer Egan's The Keep (Maslin and Smartt Bell) , or the four writers who reviewed Updike's latest. Now they're all over T.C. Boyle. Surely some of that space could be devoted to lesser-known writers? Or am I hopelessly naive?
This comment is from Carole Goldberg, book editor at the Hartford Courant:
Several reasons why I don't/can't/won't review self-published books:
With so little space -- 4 or 5 reviews a week at best -- I can't begin to keep up with the major releases by excellent known or emerging authors. I get hundreds of books each week to consider.
Most s-p books I've looked through just are not of good quality. I am a one-woman shop here at The Courant and have no assistants and cannot devote time to combing through the s-p books in hopes that I will find an overlooked gem. The poetry collections are particularly weak. And there is no way to tell if the non-fiction books have been fact-checked. (Not that much fact-checking goes on at most publishing houses, I'm afraid.)
And I see no point in giving a negative review to an s-p author. Just as our paper does not review community theater or self-produced films or CDs. It's like shooting fish in a barrel.
But I will do this much: if a local author has written a s-p book and is giving a talk, I will write a short item for our weekly calendar section with a photo of the author, explaining what the book is about…. if I have space available. This, I believe, is far more than most book editors will do. These short items have quite a readership. That way I don't have to pass judgment on the quality of the book.
Still, I get plenty of flak from s-p authors who insist their book is the rare exception and should get a full-fledged review. It's a frustrating situation all around.
-- Carole Goldberg
i I've once, and glowingly, reviewed an essentially self-published book, but like Carole, I don't often find the quality is high enough. Or, rather, that was the only time I found the book good enough to write about. I read it because it was recommended to me by someone I trust, which is often the only thing that will persuade me to read even a book published by a major house. Being implored to give the book a chance by its author does not, I'm afraid, have any effect. Unfortunately, a book's author is not a reliable authority on its worth. All authors think their book is great, the exception to the rule and sure to thrill everyone who reads it, but this is manifestly not the case.
Sadly, it's not worth the expense for a self-published author to send out a lot of review copies when most book review editors and critics won't even crack their covers.
One thing I will do: if a self-published author sends me a link to a web site that has a sample chapter, I'll usually at least read the first page. This is usually enough to tell me whether I want to see more. I can't say that I've ever actually wanted to see more, but at least I looked at it.
That said, and this is close to heresy here, but self-published authors, especially nonfiction authors, might want to question their frantic quest for reviews. Many authors have built successful careers by promoting their books via other avenues, as Dick notes. Also, as some observers like to gleefully point out, good reviews don't always result in sales of books. Isn't that what authors really want, anyway, to get more (preferrably paying) readers?
Maybe book critics could charge a few hundred dollars to small presses or self-published authors in exchange for giving their books a review? I cannot think of a book critic I know who would be influenced by money to write a positive review for a book she did not truly appreciate. (I am not being sarcastic; I mean this.)
I cross-posted with Laura and just wanted to respond to her last question:
Isn't that what authors really want, anyway, to get more (preferrably paying) readers?
I actually think many self-published authors actually would prefer getting validation from critics and reviewers to getting more paying readers.
Presumably the lack of interest in their books by agents and editors before the authors made the decision to self-publish has alerted them to the probability their books won't sell.
After all, many of the rejection letters will probably not mention the poor quality of the manuscript but instead allude to the difficulty of marketing such a work.
For example, the agents and editors will be too polite to mention the overuse of adverbs like "actually."
As tempting a solution as financial incentives may sound (to small presses and to notoriously under-paid critics), I don't know a single professional critic who would review a book in exchange for money from a publisher. That would be a clear conflict of interest more akin to paid advertising than criticism.
But apparently some critics can be bought: A while back I posted about BookSurge Publishing, which sells blurbs and reviews by NYTimes Bestselling Authors for $399 ...
I have reviewed a few self-published mysteries, usually in an effort to give a local (San Francisco Bay Area) author a little notice.
Part of my charge is to find new mystery authors worthy of attention. Throwing my eyes at the self-published is sometimes a way to do that. Some of them turn out to be good books. Some them are shoe-scrapings.
Cracking the big-publisher market these days is a nightmare for new writers -- and even for brilliant writers who have been published by one of the smaller houses. So I can understand how a writer might take the self-publishing path, although I don't think I would recommend it.
I find some of these promising new writers through my own little network of mystery lovers, and sometimes through their approaching me personally or via PR services.
The books I tend to ignore are some of the big-name authors who will sell a ton without my help just because they have established names. I especially avoid books from such authors when they have kept publishing long after whatever spark of creativity and interest they once had has disappeared.
Why don't newspaper critics like myself review print-on-demand or self-published books?
One good reason: Our legal department won't let us.
Established publishing firms have legal departments to vet manuscripts (and as Nan Talese confirmed on Oprah, that's about all they vet the ms. for). But if the book still contains something actionable and the paper reviews it (without pointing out and/or condemning the possible libel), the newspaper can be sued for helping to spread it. The paper's defense, in this instance, is to point to the publisher's legal department. Besides, which wealthy target is an enraged person likely to sue for the bigger payoff -- us or Rupert Murdoch/Bertelsmann/Time-Warner?
With a POD book, we have no gaurantee about anything. Obviously, no one has vetted it. Most aren't even edited. And if a person feels they've been libeled by such a book, which attractive target in this case has more money to pay damages, the POD author or a newspaper?
Clearly, even with the legal oversight in established publishers, there is no ironclad guarantee. But think about it: How many libel suits against books can you recall? Successful lawsuits? Not a bad track record.
Newspaper's lawyers are notoriously cautious, but they're paid to be. And they have a point here: POD books look like a legal quagmire.
Okay, I'm going to jump back in here and try once again to suggest that it is possible, nay, necessary to distinguish between vanity published books and independently published books (books that are professionally edited and produced, in other words). POD is a printing technology that even the largest houses sometimes use; it is not what differentiates vanity (or subsidy) presses from everyone else.
The general tenor of the responses from a couple of newspaper critics is that they are far too overworked and space-constrained to take the time to sort out the pile of books that don't bear the imprint of a company they already know. That speaks to a bigger problem, obviously. What I still haven't seen, though, is an acknowledgment that this emerging category of indie books actually exists and might be worth considering as it grows.
As an independent editor, I know that I and the colleagues I correspond with do indeed vet our clients' manuscripts, usually with more care than the large publishing houses do. (Most of those houses are now outsourcing the editing to freelance editors in any case, one major nonfiction publisher is planning to move all editing to India in the near future. As time goes on, you might find yourselves revisiting the question of which publishers do the better job of editing.)
I haven't mailed any of you a book, and I'm not touting any particular book right now. I'm just saying that the book publishing industry is moving in the same direction as the music industry, with a few giants putting out mass-appeal titles and trying to freeze out the little guys with niche titles. The technology, as in the music industry, is now such that independent publishers can turn out high-quality books worthy of your consideration. Lumping them all with vanity books does them a disservice and, in the end, deprives you and your readers of a lot of good reading.
That's fascinating, Jerome -- of course, it makes perfect sense that newspapers are wary of covering books that haven't been vetted by a publisher, and therefore aren't the legal responsibility of a publishing house (I've dealt with newspaper legal departments vetting stories I wrote -- they don't mess around with that stuff). I'd never thought of that as being an issue with self publishing. Makes me wonder if any self published authors have their manuscripts vetted by lawyers to cover themselves ... so I googled "libel and self published book," then got side-tracked by this column by NBCC member Bob Hoover, editor of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, about why his paper doesn't review self-published titles. All very interesting.
Rebecca:
A long post, I apologize. Yes, Bob Hoover and I discussed just this issue for my Aug. 2005 Dallas Morning News front-page story on PODs, pros and cons:
"Marketing POD books is also difficult because most major newspapers and national magazines do not review them.
'You don't know what you're getting,' said Pittsburgh Post-Gazette book editor Bob Hoover. Traditional publishers have at least a baseline of quality and editorial appraisal. But with print-on-demand, 'the editorial efforts are minimal,' he said. 'So plagiarism is an obvious danger.'
Most New York publishers also have lawyers to check any libel concerns in a manuscript. 'And a newspaper, if it repeats a libel in a review, can be included in a lawsuit,' Mr. Hoover said. 'That's certainly something I want to avoid.'"
As for Mr. Margulis' point, I'm aware that print-on-demand is simply a technology. Nevertheless, the largest POD firms are the ones whose products indundate my mailbox. And most of those POD firms operate, in part, as vanity presses: They don't pay their authors advances; their authors pay them. Traditional, old-fashioned, hardcover vanity presses are actually vanishing, mostly because they cost more and take a lot longer than the typical POD process.
So calling something a 'vanity press book' will get angry denials from POD authors (I was unable to find a major POD firm that actually uses the term "vanity press" on its website).
Are POD books improving? Sure -- although I quoted POD-dy Mouth (www.girlondemand.com), a blogger who regularly reviews POD books and who claimed, at the time, to have read more than 1,000 and who found only 24 worthwhile.
Nevertheless, a number of POD firms -- for a bigger fee, mind you -- offer professional editing, better choice of cover art, etc. But there's no real "quality control" -- that is, if an author's willing to pay, I haven't found a POD firm yet that is going to turn down his book because they think it's unsellable. That's HIS problem.
And so this emphasis on why don't critics review POD books is misplaced. Or rather, critics are really only a tiny part of the much bigger marketing-promotion picture. Why don't POD firms, if their books are such quality products, promote and market them? Well, they do -- for increased fees. But is there evidence that those odd, unconvincing ads that iUniverse takes out in the NYTimes Book Review sell books? Or are they more a promo for the company, a way to make it look just like any other established publishing house -- a promo that authors pay for at $2,500 apiece?
In his book, "Book Business: Past, Present and Future," famed editor Jason Epstein posits that print-on-demand may well be the future of ALL books in that a bookstore will have a device (they already exist) that will take your order from a giant, all-encompasing, online publishing directory and then print and bind your selection (even in hardcover).
Perhaps. I have little problem with that. But a future that's likely to arrive sooner is this (again, from my 2005 story):
"PODs also deliver a higher return per book sold. This is typically 30 to 40 percent, compared with 5 to 10 percent for traditional publishers. But Mr. Aiken of the Authors Guild noted that in addition to covering marketing and distributing costs, traditional houses often pay authors an advance. In effect, they underwrite the writing. POD firms don't.
For self-motivated sorts who know what they're doing and want to control how their book looks and how it is sold, POD can be a good bet, [Fort Worth author] Ms. Guerin-Williams said.
'I'm glad we went that way,' she said. 'We learned a lot. And some people like the quick payoff when they sell a book. It's money in their pocket.'
In this way, as a 'starter' publisher for new authors or a way for people to print a technical treatise or a family gift, print-on-demand fills functions that mainstream publishing does not, iUniverse's [president and CEO] Ms. Driscoll said.
'I don't think we're going to replace traditional publishing,' she said. 'But there's definitely a need for alternatives. There's room for more niche publishing, more niche audiences.'
Mr. Weeks,
I know I'm fighting a losing battle here, but let me try one more time. As a critic, you apply critical thinking. That is, you are capable of analyzing a situation to tease out its underlying structure. All I'm asking you to do is apply that faculty to the publishing industry.
The vanity presses, which have all or nearly all migrated to using POD technology, are in the same business they were always in. They have intentionally misled the public with their advertising to conflate what they do with publishing. Vanity books are, for the most part, trash. We agree on that. Everyone here agrees on that.
I am asking about a different sort of publishing that does not rely on vanity presses at all. Independent publishers may use POD technology to print their books; they may use the same offset printers that major publishers use to print their books. The choice of printing technology is a red herring in this discussion.
What I'm talking about is publishing that looks very much like traditional publishing--professional editing, professional design, professional proofreading, professional marketing--but that is undertaken by "companies" consisting of one proprietor who outsources those professional services and who happens also to be the author of the book he or she publishes.
The assumption that a major house's imprint guarantees high quality and a small press imprint guarantees poor quality simply doesn't hold water.
Yes, toss all the vanity imprint books in the donation bin. You've got no argument from me on that. I'm just saying that if you lump all the indie books with those you're missing some worthwhile work.
When I think of small or indie presses, I think of things like Softskull Press or Rager Media Publishers, an interesting new small publisher. Those companies don't just produce books written by their founder -- they publish a variety of authors. To me, it sounds like what Dick is talking about is still self-publishing, it's just a more professional version of it -- SP done right. The stigma of SP comes from the fact that most of it sucks because anybody can send in a Word file and turn it into a book. These self-publishers you're talking about, Dick, take the process more seriously: Hiring professional editors, etc., so it makes sense that they'd produce better work than the vanity presses.
I see a lot of these books, which authors often submit for NBCC awards: They're definitely a more professional look, feel and read than the vanity press books, but I have to say, I've never see one that stands out as a good book or a talented undiscovered writer. That doesn't mean they're not out there, I just haven't seen any. But because of their higher quality, I do look through them when they show up in my review copy pile, which is more than I do with vanity press books.
My hunch is that the professional distinctions we're talking about here aren't enough to get these books reviewed in papers with policies against reviewing SP books for libel reasons. It sounds like there's no guarantee these books have had legal vetting (because it would vary from book to book), and regardless, any suit would be more likely to target Jerome's paper than they would be to go after a small self-publishing company whose pockets probably don't look as deep. This sounds like something authors should factor into their decision to self-publish (whether they do it professionally like Dick is talking about or otherwise): SP may prevent your book from being reviewed by papers with libel policies (which, I imagine, is most of them).
One more thought: Indie presses like Softskull do get their books reviewed, I'm curious if Jerome's paper and others with those libel policies can review those, or whether they have to stick with just the larger houses.
Rebecca/Mr. Margulis:
Just a final point, and then I'm done. We're muddling things with overlapping or slippery terms. I think we agree that "vanity press" methods are what a number of POD companies are really employing. You discuss, for example, POD and vanity presses, distinguishing them.
Fine, but then you conclude that "The assumption that a major house's imprint guarantees high quality and a small press imprint guarantees poor quality simply doesn't hold water."
Who said anything about small or large? Which, I believe, is Rebecca's point in her last post. In fact, several POD firms are very large indeed, but we don't review their products. Meanwhile, I write about "small independent presses" all the time: I have a sizable feature story set for this Saturday about BenBella Books, a company that produced its first pop-culture study in 2003. It's small and independent, but it's not POD.
I can envision such a company using POD in a respectable manner, and you claim there are such firms. But so far, my experience with POD is that it's NOT just a technology, not the way it's used. It's a business model, and the model is designed to make money from the author, not from the sale of the book.
As for individual authors setting themselves up as publishers with POD: Will Clarke, the Dallas author of "Lord Vishnu's Love Handles" and "The Worthy" (both reviewed in last Sunday's NYTimes), did precisely as you described. His company was called Middlefinger Press -- partly for the reception his manuscripts received in New York. But the moment an established publisher came calling (Simon & Schuster), he quit POD and sold his books to them.
I think the water is getting muddied here. The legal issue isn't what constrains most of us. Honestly, I don't know any critic who doesn't want to "discover" and champion a talented, unknown writer and his/her book. However, there are only so many hours in the day and so much optimism in the human heart to go around. With a new work of fiction being published *every 30 minutes* night and day in the US, no one can read it all.
So we have to pick, and the information that we get from a book published by a publisher (large or small) is that someone besides the author liked it enough to read and (presumably) edit it and to spend some of their own money to put it out there in the world. Even with a self-publisher who employs top-notch freelancers to work on the title, ultimately, what we know is that so far the only person who passionately believes the book is publishable is the author, and as I've pointed out above, authors are just not reliable authorities on this count.
Now it's possible that a handful of those self-published/indie books are good, and also true that critics would be pleased to discover them. However, to do that, they have to read through most of the really, really bad ones. A person can only do so much of this before becoming profoundly discouraged and skeptical about all self-published books. (If you haven't read slush, then you really don't know how demoralizing it can be.)
As I see it, if you're one of the few good self-published authors out there, your problem is not the critics who simply can't do what is not humanly possible in reading through all the self-published dreck in search of gems (in addition to reading all the conventionally published books their employers expect them to review). Your real problem is all the bad self-published writers, who are gumming up the works and making it impossible for critics to find your book. It might be more constructive to find a solution to that!
It's not reasonable to compare indie music to indie publishing. You can quickly download a few tracks and figure out in 10 minutes or so if the band is to your liking. It takes hours to read a book. I'm intrigued, though, to learn about girlondemand, who as a blogger willing to trudge through all the bad books in search of the good is possibly showing us how the missing link between self-published authors and critics might be established.
By the way, I can't help but notice that people who claim that the imprimatur of a big publisher should be meaningless nevertheless have no problem deciding that reviews in publications like the New York Times are more desireable than reviews in, say, smaller venues.
There are so many things to add, I'm not sure where to begin. I suppose I will just add my perspective as a bookseller. We get tons of self-published authors calling wanting us to carry their books---some of them seem like they might have a market, but most frankly seem like trash. Our concern, and for many other bookstores, is how do we get this book? Who is distributing it? In the cases of small publishers, such as Soft Skull Press (whom I love), they 've done the smart thing and gotten themselves distribution with a larger company (in their case PGW). Self-publishing exposes one of the many contradictions in the publishing world. I'm frequently annoyed with the huge amount of attention certain books, such as Updike, Boyle, etc., get at the expense of other authors, be they midlist or new writers. I certainly don't like the bloated prestige a review in the New York Times carries. Like Laura Miller says, we all want to discover some new author, but do I want to slog through the enormous amounts of crap to get to that person? No, so I tend to read books from the publishing houses I know, not taking chances on unknown authors.
Anyway, I think this is an interesting discussion, one worth having.
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This discussion -- whether we realize it or not -- touches on the very future of the publishing industry.
We ought to be focused on the quality of the industry, as a whole, as it exists today. Let's admit it: Despite the benefits of third-party endorsement that come with the imprint of a major publishing house -- endorsements we have all come to envy and trust -- there remains a lot of crap coming out of those houses. Big publishing means big marketing, but not necessarily big quality.
Herein lies the issue: How do the quality voices, especially the new ones, get heard among the din of all the slick marketing speak?
I agree with Dick Margulis. Let's not focus on POD, or self-publishing. Let's focus on quality and praise the people who care enough about it to invest their own money and energy into getting voices heard.
I have more than 20 years of professional publishing credentials, including short stories published with third-party endorsement, but without even searching for an agent or major publisher, I decided to bring out my first novel, Bird in Tree, via POD for one main reason: It's time to speak up.
Corporate publishers have to make a profit, and I don't take that away from them. They must, as someone also pointed out, protect their legal heinies. In short, they need to mitigate their risk. Other people's money is at stake, and who can blame them for doing their jobs?
I don't mean to romanticize time gone by, but decades ago, the "great" writers all self-published their books. Or they published their friends' books. This group includes many names that populate the modern literary canon. Many of them would have died before going to a big corporation to ask them, hat in hand, to please publish their writing.
Because they had something to say, and they wanted to be free to say it.
All this boils down to one thing, and I'll direct this to Ms. Goldberg and the other reviewers who believe they are too busy to root through all the bad books: You are doing it anyway. Don't cheat yourself or the publishing world. Review the s-p books, and call them bad when they are (and certainly, many *are*). You will be doing your part to shake up a staid publishing industry and to give the fresh voices their say.
I self-published my first novel Lost in 2000. As Dick said, there are high-quality self-published books. I had credentials (to the degree that it matters) and engaged professional designers, etc. The book did not look self-published. I also had a marketing background, which helped. Lost got reviewed in the Philadelphia Inquirer and was a BookSense.com daily pick and my indie effort was the subject of a half-page piece in New York magazine (because everyone's mother was not yet self-publishing). The reviews are here. All of this press attention took lots of work, because of the self-publishing stigma. Of course, there are lots of bad self-published books, but no self-publisher ever put out this.
My new forthcoming novel Mean Martin Manning is not self-published but is being published by a small indie outfit, ENC Press. All due respect for the challenges reviewers face, of course, but how many people will discover anything new if all of the reviewers only review the same books?
Scott Stein
I detect a lot of silly (and quaint) 20th century thinking here.
First, you're treating physical books as the main commodity here. (If your criteria of a book's success is whether a bookseller will carry it, then obviously POD books will fail here).
Second, you overlook blogging and Internet marketing. And Amazon (which provides access to reader comments of PODs). I think book criticism is much more efficiently conducted over the web than in print media.
Third, legal mumbo-jumbo. Jerome remarks about the legal department's reluctance to run reviews of POD books. And yet, the newspapers they work for have no problem about running stories about the latest sex tape scandal.
Fourth, editing. I publish several fiction titles on the Net under pseudonyms, and yes, I knowww how to editt. Hey, maybe my blog has lots of typos, but decent writers know how to make their final product readable. (And for the record, on more than one occasion I've hired an outside editor to polish things up a bit). Having a first-class editor examine your work is a great thing, but writers today shouldn't count on it. On the other hand, celebrity authors (such as Tiger Woods, Jesse Ventura and Madonna) probably depend more on editorial "intervention" than POD writers do.
Five, economics. I believe in a fast publication schedule. It doesn't make sense for me to spend 10 years hunting around for agents and finding a reputable publisher. A person's reasons for sidestepping mainstream publishing may have less to do with the quality of their own writing and more to to do with characteristics of the publishing industry itself.
As for the quality of online fiction and poetry (which I consider myself reasonably well-informed), I find online works not particularly worse or better than what I see published the traditional way (especially for works by writers under 40). I'm not sure I would go so far as to read a slew of nanowrimo books, but I'm sure there is a gem or two waiting to be discovered. And if a blogging friend recommended one to me, I'd definitely consider reading it.
Finally ebooks will further dilute the "prestige/quality factor" of being published the traditional way. When people have methods of reading online works on digital devices (like the Sony Reader), they will be less impressed by the fact that a novel was actually published as a physical book.
The New York Times published no less than four reviews of Erik Larsen's Thunderstruck (the Crippen/Marconi story). I guess the first three glowing reviews weren't enough; the last was the only one that was critical of the book.
A few additional, important facts:
--A well-done self-published (not vanity published) book will be indistinguishable from an indie/small press book. They do get reviewed. You just never knew it.
--POD printing is used ALL THE TIME by large presses. I can't name any trade publisher who doesn't use it for backlist. And niche publications are often printed only using POD.
--All small and self-publishers need to get into some sort of distribution until they're doing enough volume to get into Ingram on their own. And most of them need to continue on that course in order to take advantage of the economies of scale. Reviewing books without trade distribution is probably a waste of time.
Subsidy presses tend to have a big black blotch on their reputations. And many of them deserve it. Statements about books being "available" through XYZ bookstores regularly mis-lead would be authors into thinking that their books will be on the shelves, instead of in a database for special order if the clerk bothers to look.
The self published book no doubt are not vetted,edited and properly designed,but first time writer can atleast put his writings into print and some of books are well written published as POD with no demand/sale.If these books are tossed up into dust bins,nobody caring to write a review and readers are unaware of facts of the published book,then it is a great disservice to the talents of those writers.
I fell into this blog by accident and found it fascinating. Especially the part about paying critics to write reviews. Hard to believe. I have ten books out. Most with small or University presses but I hear the distributor is important. My current small press publisher is WINGS Press--there was an article about them in Poets and Writers recently because he had 4 or 5 prize einners or finalists--my Beheading game was a finalist--on his list. He says the distributor makes a huge difference. He had Ingram but lnow has IPG which apparently has quadrupled sales. Thoiugh I suspect they are still small. A year or so I got a communication from a woman whose name and site I've forgotten but would be curious to look at again who for $700 a week gets your book into various trade magazines with huge circulation. Some of the authors she promoted were very respectable literary writers with good credentials. Does anyone happen to know her name? Things have gotten so much worse in the buisness--bookstores closing, reviews shrinking that I'm tempted to try!
all best Brenda
Yes, the new breed of publishers where the author takes on the responsibility of publishing. But I have something to say. I think a lot of publishers are AFRAID of certain books. Case in point: The Diary of a Crack Addict's Wife, I belive was first self-published, then picked up by a publisher. Even if I'm wrong, the book made and makes money and yet it is not well-written, lots of tangents, extremely cliche-ridden and kind of boring for a book about a crackhead. I have a book that goes way beyond what Ms. Hunter wrote, and I didn't have the luxury of having a job and a loving family to cope. My book is an original story that no one wants. YET two chapters have been published, have earned me money,and one was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and the other chapter won a literary prize.
So, go figure. It can't be that bad, my book and is certainly more interesting, deep, well-written than Diary of a Crack Addict's Wife and I keep getting told it can't sell. PLUS I have insider info about government "systems" the politicans never tell you and STILL they say it won't sell.
So, my point is that just because a book can't get published doesn't mean it's garbage.
Even though I Can totally agree with what you are sayng in regards to just because a book can't get representaton by a traditional publshng house does not mean that it's garbage what it does mean is if you believe in it then contnue to pursue your quest of self publishing it on your on. Now what I do disagree with you about is the fact of how you so blantly disrespected the author of such noted work as the Diary of a Crack Addict's Wife by Dr. Cynthia D. Hunter even though you may have thought that her book was poorly written and doesn't deserve all the recognton and accolades it's quiet apparent she did somethng right in order for it to be endorsed by a major publishing firm when you consider yours better written. In order for a tradtonal publisher to endorse "Diary" they had to see the potential and potential it has with it being an Essence's Best Seller and listed on the Forbes Book Club list. Something had to be right. This Author is truly amazing as she has helped impacted so many peoples lives with her true-life story. Maybe if you weren't so critical of others with negative energy someone would publish your book
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