Slush, it's never pretty.

[andpuff]

Terrific article by Laura Miller in Salon on the future of publishing. Or, more accurately, the future of reading.

When anyone can be a published author -- How do you find something good to read in a brave new self-published world?

Comments

[haikujaguar]

What I find misleading about articles about this is the presumption that people don't already read slush: the explosion of fan fiction all over the net means that plenty of people are already combing through stuff looking for gems, and they seem to have no problems doing it (and trading recommendations around to help other fans find the good stuff).

Most of the time if you're into something, you'll take average (or even lower) quality to have what you're looking for, and bypass the excellent thing that you're not at all interested in. And a lot of people reading online have the same "if it doesn't hook me in a few paragraphs, I'm gone" instinct that editors develop.

So I'm not sure what people writing articles like this are thinking, but I wonder if they realize that avid readers, the kind you can't keep fed, are already wading through slush online. :)

[jenna_thorn]

Exactly. Her tone is frustrating to me, since face it, I do disregard quite a lot of writing, some of it net-published, some of it self-published, some of it published by teenty tiny presses (, Panther Creek Press. I promise you've never heard of it.) Yard Dog Press is an actual publishing house and guess what? I cringed at the typographical errors throughout the books that had been through a slush pile and an editor

[haikujaguar]

That's basically how I choose my reading material, with one big exception

[jenna_thorn]

I don't know that I'd ever considered cost as a factor since I tend to be a used bookstore/ library patron, so my investment is emotional, rather than financial, but I can see your point. Emotional investment is still and investment, though, and I'll admit to a certain feeling of betrayal as I struggled through books that had been suggested by people I admired.

Are you happy with your Kindle? I'm a slow adopter of new technology, but golly, it would be nice to have one book-sized item with multiple books on it for travel purposes.

[haikujaguar]

I love my kindle. And now that the Nook and the Kindle have price-warred themselves down into the $150-ish range, there's less reason not to get one. I tried reading on an iPad and hated it... the screen's back-lighting hurts. Nothing like e-ink, which rocks.

I went back to reading paper for a little bit and then returned to my kindle, and wrote about what a relief it was(and the reasons why) here.

[jenna_thorn]

Thanks. I'm not at the point of buying one yet, but I'm inching closer to it. $150 is still too much for a gift to myself, and like I said, I'm not an early adopter. But my family tends to like to go in together for gifts, and I'm thinking this would make December's annual anxiety easier on all of us.

I'll have to go play with one at some point.

[haikujaguar]

It's definitely changed how I read for the better... and nothing reduces the distinctions between authors more clearly than having them all appear in the same typeface. *chuckle*

[carbonel]

Heh. I just downloaded Sam Starbuck's Nameless aka Animagus Winter after reading The Cartographer's Craft, though I haven't read it yet. I suspect the writing style may be too arty for my tastes, given the Ellis Graveworthy snippets in TCC, but we shall see.

[jenna_thorn]

YMMV, of course, but Nameless is, to me, more accessible than either Cartographer or Dead Isle. It's a bit leisurely paced, but eventually I fell in and didn't want to climb back out. I had trouble getting into the Shoe Box project, though the rest of the world loved it. But then, I liked Charitable Giving and read it as a WiP, so I may just happen to be his target audience for origfic.

This is why one person's signpost is another person's warning sign. There's a movie reveiwer for my local big newspaper. If he hates a movie, I'm pretty sure I'll love it, and vice versa.