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

[tigertoy]

When I hear professional editors talk about how awful their slush piles are, I worry, but I take a lot more comfort from two things. First, while I haven't read an enormous amount of self-published material, I have read some (mostly on line, a little in print), and while some of it has been truly awful, I've found that a lot of it is quite a bit better than it was supposed to have been. As in, I've found a fair bit of material on bulletin board sites that I thought was better than a lot of the regular published books on my shelf that I paid for. The on-line stuff does tend to be slightly worse in the proofreading and copy-editing department -- but most of it isn't that much worse. And second, I'm a filker, so I look at the filk community. The original songs we produce are certainly a slush pile, and there are certainly a lot of filks that don't really deserve to be performed a second time. But the community is better at producing songs I care about than the wider music industry. The average quality of all the songs filkers

[lenora_rose]

On the one hand, yes, fanfiction has managed to pull off a non-editorial system where recommendations and beta readers take the place of publishers and editors respectively (And requests for specific fics, quick plot summaries etc take the place of the advertising end - in some cases more successfully, because it's really easy to answer a specific request for a specific plotline, where publishing advertising is meant to explain itself to a broad readership.) And it's reassuring to know that the cream can rise even in a field so rife with bad writing and so many additional difficulties finding what you're looking for

[lenora_rose]

Ooops. I meant to link to the source for the Valente quote:

The End of the World as We Know It (And I feel fine)

[seadreamer]

My two pennies, for what they're worth... Yes, OMG yes there is some truly spectacularly bad writing out there. I know. I've read it. I've even paid for it. And also, honestly, there are writers whose original non-professional fiction (and that's my description, not thiers, perhaps) is as good as (and in no few cases, better) main-stream published works. I have a friend that I literally BEG to find an agent, but for her, it's all just done in fun. That's not even jumping into the quicksand that is fanfiction. (And I have to admit, I have see (and read) fanwriters who are just better at the craft of writing than the original published author was, bbut that's a whole other soapbox. But anyway, to the subject at hand, being slush. It's always there. As the article states, now everyone has the means to get their voice out there in this electronic world, and be heard. You know what? Dedicated readers will seek the gems in the slush. We'll track them down eventually, and I have to say that for myself personally, no electronic