Who Needs Editors?
Earlier this week, Henry Baum of Self-Publishing Review wrote about self-publishing and how having an editor (let alone a good one) is highly over-rated because you can count on idiots to buy your crap anyway. And because readers are morons, they'll probably even like it.
At the risk of sounding like a snob: non-sophisticated readers will not care if writing is non-sophisticated, and there are a lot more non-sophisticated readers than sophisticated ones. That’s millions of potential readers. Publishers might like to believe that they have the finger on the pulse of what sells - or what should sell - but when mediocre writing is becoming a bestseller, this pretty much renders the slush pile meaningless.
I find it interesting that while he pulls out examples of bestselling self-published works, he's quick to point out he's never read any of them. I don't know whether that's because Baum doesn't read self-published works, if the ones he's read linger in obscurity, or if there's some other reason every book he cites requires a disclaimer of the "I haven't read this" variety, but it pretty much serves to undermine the point he's trying to make. Yes, if people are able to download a book for free or to buy it for 99 cents, people will download that puppy. But how many of them are actually being read? It's really easy to make that low-risk investment and then let it sit there on your computer or e-reader while you put priority on something you were interested enough in to pay full cover price. It's also a lot easier to get about 10 pages in to the 99 cent book and give it up as unreadable. Low risk means you're much less likely to work for a potential payoff compared to something you paid 10$ for.
And as to the assertion that readers are essentially dumb and will like just about anything set in front of them... that's just absurd. Maybe Baum isn't aware of just how terrible the slush pile can be if he thinks there's a crapton of money to be made in all those rejected manuscripts. Granted, I'm a critical reader (which is kind of the point of this blog) and prone to overanalyzing but let's give people a little credit. Yes, mediocre books become bestsellers, but when was the last time you picked up a bestseller that required you to stop every other paragraph because you couldn't decipher what it was the author is trying to say?
Some writers are very well suited to self-publishing, and not all self-published books are scraped from the bottom of the rejected slush pile. Some of them are wonderful and push more boundaries than anything you'll read coming out of a New York publisher. But to say editors are useless because readers don't care how solid your book is... well, you should really be sentenced to a full year of wading through the slush pile. And then you can come back and tell me whether you think editors are valuable.
At the risk of sounding like a snob: non-sophisticated readers will not care if writing is non-sophisticated, and there are a lot more non-sophisticated readers than sophisticated ones. That’s millions of potential readers. Publishers might like to believe that they have the finger on the pulse of what sells - or what should sell - but when mediocre writing is becoming a bestseller, this pretty much renders the slush pile meaningless.
I find it interesting that while he pulls out examples of bestselling self-published works, he's quick to point out he's never read any of them. I don't know whether that's because Baum doesn't read self-published works, if the ones he's read linger in obscurity, or if there's some other reason every book he cites requires a disclaimer of the "I haven't read this" variety, but it pretty much serves to undermine the point he's trying to make. Yes, if people are able to download a book for free or to buy it for 99 cents, people will download that puppy. But how many of them are actually being read? It's really easy to make that low-risk investment and then let it sit there on your computer or e-reader while you put priority on something you were interested enough in to pay full cover price. It's also a lot easier to get about 10 pages in to the 99 cent book and give it up as unreadable. Low risk means you're much less likely to work for a potential payoff compared to something you paid 10$ for.
And as to the assertion that readers are essentially dumb and will like just about anything set in front of them... that's just absurd. Maybe Baum isn't aware of just how terrible the slush pile can be if he thinks there's a crapton of money to be made in all those rejected manuscripts. Granted, I'm a critical reader (which is kind of the point of this blog) and prone to overanalyzing but let's give people a little credit. Yes, mediocre books become bestsellers, but when was the last time you picked up a bestseller that required you to stop every other paragraph because you couldn't decipher what it was the author is trying to say?
Some writers are very well suited to self-publishing, and not all self-published books are scraped from the bottom of the rejected slush pile. Some of them are wonderful and push more boundaries than anything you'll read coming out of a New York publisher. But to say editors are useless because readers don't care how solid your book is... well, you should really be sentenced to a full year of wading through the slush pile. And then you can come back and tell me whether you think editors are valuable.