"Stories that just generally drip crap out of every electronic orifice"

[inverarity]

Interesting post and discussion from author Lee Goldberg about self-published authors. In the comments is a lot of back and forth between Goldberg and Joe Konrath, a professional author who’s gone the self-published route

Comments

[ebilgatoloco]

This is interesting. I'll have to think about it.

[fpb]

I am entirely on the "pro-crap" side, with one proviso: that reviewers and commentators are allowed to say what they like, with no howls of protest or attempts at comeback by incensed authors. This is not aimed at you (of course) and not intended to mean that an author should not be naturally annoyed by negative reviews; but they must be taken in a spirit of fairness, in the sense of "I can print anything I like within the limits of the law - and so can they, even if they honk me off".

Don't think this is a meaningless proviso. Cyber-libel, cyber-defamation, cyber-mobbing and cyber-lynching are well practiced and developed techniques in this lawless Wild West of fibreoptics cables, and a bad writer with a high sense of self-regard is just the kind of person to set them off. It was bed enough in pre-electronic fandom; in a world where anyone in Pago Pago or Ulanbaatar can access a page set up exactly to slander an unknowing third party, fairness becomes an absolute necessity.

some books really are too niche to find a publisher,

[inverarity]

Well, you can't stop authors from howling in protest or attempting a comeback, but that always goes badly for the author.

I can see why a nine-volume non-fiction series would be a tough sell. Why haven't you considered Scribd or Smashwords?

[ebilgatoloco]

It was years ago, and I'm not sure that that sort of publisher even existed back then. The thing however is that Arthurian hypothetical hystory books are among the safest sellers in the non-fiction field (although some of them strain the definition of non-fiction pretty heavily). I can understand a small publisher with a few dozen employees could not afford such a risk, but when I have subsidiaries of Macmillan or Viking Penguin telling me the same story, I have to ask them whether their marketing and publicity departments are for show only. But what the heck. It was only I who thought the damn book was any good, and I was probably deluding myself anyway.

I think you underrate the potential for retaliation on unwelcome critics. The amount of damaging lies that can be told online against someone, virtually without retribution and often without the victim even knowing, is immense; the internet is one enormous invitation to scheming, vindictive paranoiacs.

[fpb]

Oh, and I forgot: Anne Rice is not just batshit crazy "about it" - "it" meaning fanfic. She is batshit crazy, period; not to mention an attention seeker of Paris Hilton proportions.