Broke My New Years Resolution

In November and December of last year several of my peers and professional authors beat me up over my reading habits. I finished everything I read, no matter how much I hated it. And for years I wrote reviews of all but five of the books I’d finished.

This was, they explained, “life-shorteningly dumb.”

The negative reviews potentially made those authors my enemies before I’d ever met them, and I’d wasted my time by completing books I didn’t enjoy. Sometimes I’d tried to study how novels were failing to better my understanding, but no matter the approach, I never actually got much out of analyzing a book that stunk. And because often I hesitated to read at all when the present book was bad, I slowed down my overall consumption.

Thus all I got was a lugubrious experience with the option of additional negative experiences some day should an author find the review and take it personally. There are nightmare stories of major authors whose careers were hampered not by authors, but the author’s vengeful agent or publisher. It’s something to think about the next time you bag on Dan Brown.

My 2011 resolution worked great: to write a damned novel. I’d gone too many years without a new one. If you’ve been following The Bathroom Monologues for long, you know I conquered that bastard. I’m drawing up skeletons for additional ones now.

So my 2012 resolution was to put some books down. If it didn’t show promise, insight or improve toward the end of the first hundred pages? Then give it back to the library, or lend it to a friend who might like it better, or just shelve it.

Also less of that secondary policy of mine: shelving a book over and over again, to give it another chance in six months, or when I was in the mood for Gothic Horror, or whatever caprice would inevitably strike.

With over a hundred unread books in my closet, shelves and hard drive, keeping old ones was bloating the list. Also, historically? Most of the books that didn’t appeal on the first go usually didn’t fare better on the third or fifth. I had to get the guts to fire some novels from my employment.

It’s April, and I’m uneasy about the policy. Outliers still haunt me. It wasn’t until my fifth reading that the brilliance of Animal Farm struck me. I stand by my belief than the first hundred pages of A Game of Thrones are the dullest in the whole series; what great characterization I’d have missed if I gave up on it there.

It’s April, and I’ve finished eleven books. I’ve discarded six others midway through and feel no guilt, because regret has been paved over by the good works that have taken up more of my free time. It’s better that I got to P.G. Wodehouse’s Mr. MullinerSpeaking and Tom Perrotta’s The Leftovers sooner, or so I insist to myself when the outliers start a-haunting.

I’ve reneged on the resolution three times so far. One is obvious: for National Novel Reading Month, the activity devoted to catching up on classics, I slogged through all of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, which led both to much personal groaning and much public scorn for my lack of taste. True to form, I reviewed it. I’m not afraid of Austen’s publishers, and probably not afraid enough of the damage this could do to my reputation. 

The best news is that in this period I’ve felt roughly equally bad reviewing what I disliked and ditching books that failed to impress. Why is this good news? Because if I can even convince myself of the parity, then I can make an easier dash for the exit on the next clunker.

Doubts and outliers still haunt me, though, and I’ll have some questions about your reading and unreading habits tomorrow.

Quality: Self-Pub Vs. Traditional-Pub

So, Kristine Kathryn Rusch wrote a really long and strangely strawman-heavy argument that traditional publishing doesn’t guarantee quality. I like Rusch’s blog, and this was just one of many pieces defending the self-publishing market’s reputation at the expense of traditional publishing.

Honestly, I wanted to be on board with her. I know that there is quality work in the self-published market, and that there are some incredibly talented and hard-working freelance editors, and that many of the traditionally-published writers will be better off moving to self-publication, and most certainly there are publishing house editors that slack off.

But so much of Rusch’s diatribe (like many similar diatribes) was oversimplified or felt like deliberate untruth. She claimed to receive e-mails from traditional-publishing writers and editors who, “believe that only traditional publishing can guarantee that the reader will get a quality product.” How many of those e-mails actually espoused belief in that guarantee? I'm willing to bet very few, though I don't have the evidence since it's her inbox, not mine. No one in my inbox, and no one I can remember talking to, espoused this belief. I damned sure don’t believe traditional publishing guarantees quality work, and haven’t believed that since I was eleven and bought a bad traditionally published book at a school fair.

Now, I have run into many people who presumed it more likely that a traditionally-published book would be worthwhile than a self-published one. It seems like most of those people believed this based on experience with vanity publishing and the stuff that mucks the 99-cent zone on Amazon, though I didn’t keep a tally. There is definitely the cultural impression that your odds are better with a mainstream publisher’s book than with self-published book. That's a serious (and in several ways flawed) concern authors must deal with, but rarely gets a fair hearing.

Not everyone who works in traditional publishing thinks all their products are better than all the products in the self-publishing market, nor do all writers view it that way, nor have I ever heard anyone ever voice the opinion that, in Rusch’s words, "Amanda Hocking’s books [are] better because St. Martins Press published them." For such a long article, she created many unfortunate strawmen that only undermined the credibility of her argument, especially when what she was arguing towards could easily be oversimplified to "Any self-published books are just as good as any traditionally published books." Whether or not she believes this, it is something these arguments reduce to too often, and it is only invited by pre-emptively engaging in this sort of oversimplification.

I'm reading Tom Perrotta's The Leftovers right now. No self-published book I've read in the last fifteen months can touch it. In fact, most of those self-published books weren't worth finishing.

Does that mean all self-published books are crap? No.

Does it mean self-published books can't meet the high quality of the best traditionally-published books? No, and I'd sure hope not, as it's the avenue I'm considering.

But does it indicate that most self-published books don't meet the level of quality of high-end traditionally-published books? That's the sticking point Rusch failed to address rigorously, and in my experience, that ardent self-pubbers circle around in over-defense of their distribution model. This is the sticking point that, more than anything and despite the talent of many writers in the e-pub world, sustains the current stigma.

Have I read crappy traditionally-published books? Yes, too many. Too many not to laugh when traditionally published authors leave the big New York houses to self-publish. It’s a funny world.