RE: Our "publish then filter" future...

Jon,

I have to disagree. The model you describe is what makes it extremely
difficult for non-mainstream publishers to place their books in venues
where the people most likely to want them will find them: i.e.,
bookstores, etc.

Amazon accounts for only 10% of all book sales. That's not nearly enough
for a publisher to survive. Unfortunately, because the PROCESS of
print-on-demand has become synonymous with subsidy/vanity publishing,
books so produced are all lumped together--and tagged as badly written,
unedited and awful.

Creative work isn't like widgets. The goal isn't to turn out as many as
possible for the least cost to sell at whatever the market will bear.
The goal might be to SELL that way, but there's a subtle difference.
Books are a luxury item, not a necessity, bookaholics notwithstanding.
It does no good for a really good book to have to compete for the
limited attention and spare dollar of the reader with thousands and
thousands of other books, many of which should never have seen the light
of day whether it be print or electronic.

As a publisher, editor, writer and sometime reviewer of books, I KNOW
just how much godawful writing is being produced. Unfortunately, a
goodly amount of it is also being published, either by "publishers" who
set up to make a quick buck by churning out as many books as they can
manage or "self-published" using one of the subsidy services.

One study determined that 80% of the US population believes they have a
book to write. Pardon me if I don't believe all those people have either
the talent or the skill to write well. Nevertheless, about a million of
them actually do write a book each year. I'd wager 95% of them are
unpublishable.

Having knowledgeable people vet the stream of manuscripts produced
annually isn't some kind of blockade to having true genius find its
place. Acquiring books is a VERY subjective process, and I get at least
one email a month from some author I rejected gloating about how X is
going to publish the book I rejected. I guess I'm supposed to feel
embarrassed I missed out, which to me just indicates how little most
writers understand about the acquisition process--even when I tell them
it's just MY opinion.

If a writer has submitted their book to every publisher they can find,
and been rejected by them all, there's likely very good reason: either
the book isn't of professional quality or the market for it is so small
no publisher can afford to take it on. My experience for the last five
years is that most fall into the first category.

A careful study of how many of the thousands of subsidy-published books
printed every year sell more than a handful of copies quickly reveals
that your premise doesn't hold up in actuality. For ever well-written,
properly edited, professionally designed self-published book that sells
a couple thousand copies, there are thousands of unreadable, unedited,
template-layout ones that do no more than stroke the author's ego.

Contrary to what some aspiring writers want to believe, there IS a
standard that defines good writing. Subsidy presses don't care about
that--they're being paid to produce a book. All flooding the market does
is make my job harder and do my authors a disservice, since they have to
battle not only the market as a whole but the perception that the
quality of their work is defined by the method by which their work is
produced.

L
Elizabeth Burton
Zumaya Publications LLC
Austin TX
http://www.zumayapublications.com



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