A recent post on Sullivan's blog titled "Our Publishers, Ourselves" makes an EXCELLENT point on publishing, particularly:
One such value: DEVELOPING A SOLID BUT STILL HALF-COMPLETED MANUSCRIPT INTO A FULLY-REALIZED ONE.
From what I've seen from the self-published world, the majority of work is riddled with errors (which a good copy editor could have caught), and, worse, with poorly-realized concepts, plots, character arcs and ideas. Historically, editors and publishers have performed the crucial service of vetting the mountains of crap in search of the nuggets of good stories (at least, the good ones have - the bad ones were just "public distributors" of varying skill and effectiveness as described in the article). I have to ask: in a world where any moron can crap out a 120k word "magnum d'oh-pus" and then sell it on Amazon for $.99 (thereby lowering expectations in vast swaths of the reading public for both what a book's QUALITY as well as the COST should be, as fellow writer Melissa Long recently pointed out), who - IF ANYONE - is going to fulfill this role? I worry, more and more, that the answer is "nobody".
"...if traditional publishers — of all kinds, not just the book industry — want to maintain some of the value they have had in the past, they will have to stop thinking about controlling the process of distribution or the delivery platform, and think more about the services they can add for authors and readers."
One such value: DEVELOPING A SOLID BUT STILL HALF-COMPLETED MANUSCRIPT INTO A FULLY-REALIZED ONE.
From what I've seen from the self-published world, the majority of work is riddled with errors (which a good copy editor could have caught), and, worse, with poorly-realized concepts, plots, character arcs and ideas. Historically, editors and publishers have performed the crucial service of vetting the mountains of crap in search of the nuggets of good stories (at least, the good ones have - the bad ones were just "public distributors" of varying skill and effectiveness as described in the article). I have to ask: in a world where any moron can crap out a 120k word "magnum d'oh-pus" and then sell it on Amazon for $.99 (thereby lowering expectations in vast swaths of the reading public for both what a book's QUALITY as well as the COST should be, as fellow writer Melissa Long recently pointed out), who - IF ANYONE - is going to fulfill this role? I worry, more and more, that the answer is "nobody".
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