4 ms·

The main benefit I receive from publishers is filtering. Even the worst publisher printing unbelievable shlock is light years ahead of the garbage in the publis

• tjic 17y ago
  > The main benefit I receive from publishers is filtering. The main benefit I receive from my friends is filtering. Now, the question is: do publishers or my friends do that job better?
  • msg 17y ago
    Or a deeper question, are the publishers making your friends' lives easier by doing it first? Do your friends read thousands of self-published books to provide you with recommendations? Or is all their action applied after the mainstream publishers' filter? I'm sure there is self-published stuff out there that is worth my time. Unfortunately, I don't want to read the literary equivalent of MySpace to find it. A good publisher has a quality bar I can trust, and they've taken on the burden of reading unsolicited submissions. And as the blog post says, 75% of it is unreadable crap, 24% is readable but not worth your time, and 1% or less is quality and publishable. That's a lot of hours you and your friends would have wasted.
• andrewcooke 17y ago
  that's true for me (using publishers as filters) when i'm in a bookstore. but i don't think i've looked at who the publisher of a book is when buying from amazon for ages - typically i read amazon's comments and then google around for what other people are saying.