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Comment by HelloMcFly | Hacker News Reader

I know the tech crowd in general seems to correlate highly with the crowd the endorses the future of self-publishing, and I get it. Yet, I cannot help but think that many of these "let the people decide" self-publishing advocates have not waded much into the work of the self-published author.

I'm an avid reader; honestly, given my nighttime reading patterns, I probably read too much. I've been to the deep ends of reading self-published work (much of it "acclaimed") and I'm not satisfied. Perhaps one day we'll arrive at a place where crowd-sourced reviews adequately filter the wheat from the chaff in an editor- and marketing-less world, but I'm not convinced we are there just yet.

Short version: I've read many (i.e., 10+) self-published works, and few of them have me looking forward to a world without publishers. I appreciate "elitist" filters that still allow pulpy sci-fi and fantasy through. I'm not ready to see them leave quite yet.

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> Perhaps one day we'll arrive at a place where crowd-sourced reviews adequately filter the wheat from the chaff in an editor- and marketing-less world, but I'm not convinced we are there just yet.

As more and more authors are simply buying dozens of 5* reviews for their books on sites like fiverr (or outsourcing it to Book Marketing companies who do the dirty work on their behalf), then I think we're moving further from that world, rather than closer to it.

>and few of them have me looking forward to a world without publishers

But some do, correct? I've been reading quite a few (more than 10, probably more like 20-30) lately and I've ran across more than a few great finds. Granted, maybe our "Standards" are vastly different - I admit freely to being spat upon by literary purists for reading Science Fiction and Fantasy.

I've ran into more than a few utter piles though. I'm more selective based on total reviews, so I'm not getting anything cutting edge (10 reviews - 4.5 stars, no thanks, 180 reviews 4 stars, sure). I don't have friends or contacts of any sort that read what I do, so unfortunately that's all I can do.

"Perhaps one day we'll arrive at a place where crowd-sourced reviews adequately filter the wheat from the chaff in an editor- and marketing-less world, but I'm not convinced we are there just yet."

How do you find books to read?

My techniques are: Amazon suggestions, browsing at the library, blogs, forums, and following my favorite authors websites.

None of these require a publisher.

The difference is - for every 1 book that a reputable publisher puts out, they reject 1000. Now, perhaps 500 of those books might have OK, and maybe 50 of them might have been quite good, and it's entirely possible that the 1 book they did chose to publish, was not as good as 10-15 others they rejected - but, on the flip side, it's highly unlikely that the publisher is going to chose one of the 500 dogs that never deserve to see the light of day.

The problem with Crowd sourced reviews, is that quite often, other people might like quite crappy books. The job of a publisher isn't to just find a book that they like, but that the general reading population will love.

I appreciate and respect what the publisher does as part of their filtering - I just suspect they are extracting more value than they are worth.

Hopefully established authors are able to negotiate increasingly more lucrative deals as a reflection of both the reduced risk, as well as the increased value they bring to the equation (as well as the reduced value that the publisher brings. I can't tell you who Stephen King's publisher is...)

It's true that a whole lot of important filtering goes on.

Otherwise we'd have to put up with Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey, when we could be reading polished high-quality titles that twinkle with the elusive literary aura that only publishers can add.

[snerk]

Here is The Thing: publishing used to be an educated middle class business catering to educated middle class readers.

Self-publishing opened the market to less-educated writers producing work for less-educated readers. Amazon basically reinvented the old Victorian penny dreadful market in digital form.

Does this matter? Not really. The penny dreadfuls didn't kill literature. In fact, in a round-about way, they eventually launched science fiction and fantasy as genres.

Publishers gave up on real literature back in the 80s, when all the old small semi-amateur publishing houses were swallowed by corporate sharks. So don't look for not-crappy there.

There is some basic filtering to eliminate people who can't write at all. But Amazon reviewers are getting pickier, so it's not obvious the can't write at all crowd will survive for much longer.

Meanwhile, many not-quite-mainstream writers have pulled themselves out of publisher-enforced poverty by selling direct.

Is this a bad thing? No, it really isn't.

"The problem with Crowd sourced reviews, is that quite often, other people might like quite crappy books. The job of a publisher isn't to just find a book that they like, but that the general reading population will love."

I don't care about the "general reading population"; I want books that I will enjoy. Recommendation engines provide a lot more value in this area than publishers (at least for fiction).

Let's be honest here, I would say most publisher's aren't filtering to keep the quality of writing high but to publish anything they think will sell a certain amount. If they rejected a book because it wasn't written well but it was then self-published and ended up being very popular and selling well I would imagine most publisher's would wish they had signed the author, regardless of how bad the writing is.

A publisher filters to find books that will sell, not to find great writing. In some instances great writing will sell quite well, in others that crappy romance novel can be a hit with a lot people. Publisher's release garbage all the time, it's not like they're some guardian angels of good writing. Maybe it would be awesome if we could just let the readers decide whether a book is good to them or not?

As a side note, the assumption here is that reviews are legit and not bought. To me the non-ideal situation of fake reviews is a separate issue vs the principle of whether legitimate customer reviews can serve as a good filter for readers. My experience has been that they certianly can.

> None of these require a publisher.

I'm on the side of Amazon here, but let's not get carried away.

The books in your local library have largely come through a traditional publisher. Those blogs, forums, and author websites are going to be biased (not in the perjorative sense, but as in selection bias) toward titles that have come through traditional publishers as well.

The closest we can come to seeing a world without the influence of a publisher is Amazon's self-published titles, and they're really not good on average. I don't have a huge number of data points myself, but I haven't heard anyone rave about the quality of a randomly selected self-published title.

I think there's still a valuable role for the publishers to play. However, that role is quite a bit smaller than it once was, and the publishers are currently entrenched in a position of taking the same high cut of the profits that they've always taken, and that's going to have to change in order for them to do well in the longer term.

Amazon suggestions, browsing at the library, blogs, forums, and following my favorite authors websites.

I usually go in this order: recommendations from friends, reviews, browsing bookstores or libraries, and books sent by publishers or authors (I write a blog about books and ideas at http://jseliger.wordpress.com).

One question is how that initial seeding group happens; right now it tends to through Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and related means. But that gets towards complicated questions of how information and ideas propagate through a society, and I think we're going to be sorting that out for a long time.

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