How Do You Find the Good Stuff?

Laura Miller of Salon.com says if the predictions of a wonderful world of self-publishing materialize, average readers will have a very large pile of poor writing to weed through. She describes reading The Slush Pile, that growing mound of unsolicited manuscripts that some publishers assign to an editorial peon.

Miller writes that we on the outside of publishing should fear what we don’t know: “Civilians who kvetch about the bad writing of Dan Brown, Stephenie Meyer or any other hugely popular but critically disdained novelist can talk as much trash as they want about the supposedly low standards of traditional publishing. They haven’t seen the vast majority of what didn’t get published . . .”

In a world where any manuscript can be published and placed with online retailers, readers will suffer. Reading bad writing can hurt. “[I]nstead of picking up every new manuscript with an open mind and a tiny nibbling hope, you learn to expect the worst. Because almost every time, the worst is exactly what you’ll get.”

3 thoughts on “How Do You Find the Good Stuff?”

  1. It is depressing how much stuff there is to filter through. I think price can be a good filter, but not always. Free books don’t do much for me – I’ve never actually read one of an ebook site or anything. I would hope authors have enough respect for their work to get it to an editor, proofreader, beta reader, or something, but I think there’s a lot who don’t.

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