If a Book Is Good, Does It Matter How It Was Published?
[digg=http://digg.com/arts_culture/If_a_Book_Is_Good_Does_It_Matter_How_It_Was_Published]With the hullabaloo about the SterlingHouse Publishers booth at BEA last week, I started thinking about how important the publishing house is to the success of a book.
Publishers provide important services (editing, design, production) and the access to online and bricks-and-mortar stores that the average self-published book simply won’t get.
And the dangers of self-publishing, with its high price tags and the virtual impossibility of getting those books into stores where consumers could actually buy them, are well documented. (Writers Beware is one source of information, but there are certainly others. A quick web search will net a wealth of information.)
But, if a book is good, does it really matter whether it came from a vanity publisher or a traditional publisher? If all other variables were controlled, would a good book that came from a publisher notorious in the industry for releasing unedited crap stand a chance? Would reviewers throw away their review copies unopened, unwilling to waste their and their readers’ time on a book that is obviously junk? Would readers take a chance on a new author from a publisher that had a bad reputation? Or from a self-published author who had done all of the due diligence of a traditional publisher?
My inclination is that it would still matter. Even if the author was the next great national treasure, he or she would always be tainted by the reputation of the shoddy publisher or the vanity press. The distribution variables simply can’t be controlled. A traditional publisher has a much greater ability to distribute books than a single author has. And, really, what good is a book if no one reads it?
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Categories: Uncategorized, writing
Nice post though. I enjoyed reading it.
