Why does rubbish get published?

Tastes change. People like different things.

While it is possible to say- objectively- that certain books are bad, it is quite hard to do. I can't say that the books I dislike are objectively bad, because my dislike of them is getting in the way.

It's not to my taste=/= It's terrible.

And besides, terrible things have always been published. They just don;t stay in bookstores, or in the memory. I have a habit of picking up really bad old books from antiques fairs. My earliest 'bad book' was originally published in the early 1900's and was popular enough to be reprinted a few times- and IT'S TERRIBLE. Cardboard characters, purple prose, a story with no internal logic. I have no dount there were older ones, but that I just can't get hold of them.

So, you've become an AW member to introduce yourself, and gripe about the lack of quality of recent [fantasy] books.

Tell us about your books and how they will change the world.

dxarmbar06 said:

It just seems like literature is experiencing a decline in, well, literature since the last decade. A lot of people seem to hate prose in books, which makes every book published seem like an overblown blog-post, at least to me, I really enjoy literary reticence.

I just want to know what's going on is all. Is it the economy, people watching too much television, competition with other media, are people just stupider? Why aren't hulking tomes of big words published anymore?

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Firstly, just because a book is 'hulking' and uses big words does not make good writing. Although your use of the word 'stupider' did make me spit coffee [oh, the irony . . . ]

If you believe that literature is in decline, I say that I believe you are not looking hard enough. My favourite book of 2010 was James Robertson's And The Land Lay Still [and I'm very excited, as I'm going to an author event tomorrow night held by Robertson.]

Momento Mori said:

You know, I thought this question seemed familiar. You phrased almost exactly the same one last year:

http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=212085

and were given many answers before the thread inevitably got locked.

There are other things to talk about on this site. I suggest you find one rather than rehashing old wank-bait.

MM

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And yet people are still responding!

Guardian said:

To be honest, when I tried reading Twilight I was surprised to find it was an easy read. My eyes just kept going... but it was like eating food with no nutritional value.

I don't care if an author uses big words or single syllable words. If there's something interesting there and being told well, I'll read it.

Yes, there's probably a decline in attention span. Everyone keeps insisting society is on the decline, so it must be -- ooh a shiny thing. Where was I?

Honestly I don't know HOW rubbish gets through. If you persist, you'll find a publisher who will take your book, I suppose. Maybe it is the agents/publishers who are getting the shorter attention span. "Great" books like Harry Potter took forever and a day to get published, and that series at least got huge amounts of kids really into reading. At least they can read, yeah?

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What shiny thing? Where? *looks around eagerly*

There's always rubbish around. Always. I blame it on fashion.

When you get really really ancient like me you'll realise that the dross gets lost in the course of time, which is why people assume past generations had higher standards.

They didn't.

The question isn't why does it get published. It's how does it get published. And - I'm still thinking fashion.

Bestsellers in 1974:
http://www.super70s.com/Super70s/Culture/Books/1974/

Other historical bestseller lists [NYT bestseller #1 per year]:
1948

East Side, West Side by Marcia Davenport (Scribner's) - February 8, 1948
Eagle In the Sky by Van Wyck Mason (Lippincott) - March 7, 1948
The Ides of March by Thornton Wilder (Harper) - April 4, 1948
Raintree County by Ross Lockridge (Houghton Mifflin) - April 25, 1948
Pilgrim's Inn by Elizabeth Goudge (Coward-McCann) - May 23, 1948
The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer (Rinehart) - June 20, 1948
Shannon's Way by A. J. Cronin (Little, Brown) - September 5, 1948
The Young Lions by Irwin Shaw (Random House) - November 7, 1948
The Big Fisherman by Lloyd C. Douglas (Houghton Mifflin) - December 19, 1948



1950

The Parasites by Daphne du Maurier (Doubleday) - February 19, 1950
The Wall by John Hersey (Knopf) - March 26, 1950
The Cardinal by Henry Morton Robinson (Simon & Schuster) - April 30, 1950
Across the River and Into the Trees by Ernest Hemingway (Scribner's) - October 15, 1950
The Disenchanted by Budd Schulberg (Random House) - December 3, 1950

1951

Joy Street by Francis Parkinson Keyes (Messner) - January 14, 1951
From Here to Eternity by James Jones (Scribner's) - March 25, 1951
The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk (Doubleday) - August 12, 1951

1952

My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier (Doubleday) - March 30, 1952
The Silver Chalice by Thomas Costain (Doubleday) - September 7, 1952
East of Eden by John Steinbeck (Viking) - November 2, 1952

1953

Désirée by Annemarie Selinko (Morrow) - March 8, 1953
Beyond This Place by A. J. Cronin (Little, Brown) - October 11, 1953
Lord Vanity by Samuel Shellabarger (Little, Brown) - November 29, 1953

1954

Not as a Stranger by Morton Thompson (Scribner's) - February 14, 1954
Mary Anne by Daphne du Maurier (Doubleday) - August 1, 1954
Love Is Eternal by Irving Stone (Doubleday) - October 17, 1954

Hasn't the definition of bestseller changed since then? It's not physically possible that all the books on which I see 'bestseller' written are, in fact bestsellers.

Or maybe the definition of 'best' has changed?

I notice some months are missing (and there are books I don't like on those lists also).

Guardian said:

If you persist, you'll find a publisher who will take your book, I suppose.

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Nope. A completely, utterly, unutterably bad book (which is 90% of what is submitted) will never be accepted by a legitimate publisher. Never. Ever.

Guardian said:

"Great" books like Harry Potter took forever and a day to get published....

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No. If it had taken forever and a day, we still wouldn't have it. More to the point, Harry Potter was 'only' rejected by around 20 publishers. This isn't all that many in the grand scheme of things.

Many books that get picked up were rejected by the first couple of publishers. This can be for all kinds of perfectly good reasons. Publishers reject perfectly good publishable books every day because no publisher can publish every publishable book that is submitted to them. They have to pick and choose.

I believe that most publishable books will indeed eventually get picked up, but there will always be exceptions, a few that slip through the cracks. But the opposite isn't true: not all books written will get picked up just because the writer is persistent.

Goldenleaves said:

Hasn't the definition of bestseller changed since then? It's not physically possible that all the books on which I see 'bestseller' written are, in fact bestsellers.

Or maybe the definition of 'best' has changed?

I notice some months are missing (and there are books I don't like on those lists also).

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you can check this link:

http://www.hawes.com/no1_f_d.htm

Everything seems better in hindsight, but I know there were a lot of bad books published in my youth as well.

If you look at classical music, you get the idea that there were many brilliant composers, but there were a lot of composers whose work just wasn't popular enough to remain popular after they died.

Same goes for books. Of course there are more books published nowadays, but there are a lot of books that sold well at the time, but are out of print nowadays. And mostly because nobody is interested in those books anymore.

4 posts in total

3 on how everything is crap

2 locked already


I smell a troll

quicklime said:

4 posts in total

3 on how everything is crap

2 locked already


I smell a troll

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My guess is this'll be locked as soon as a mod comes along.

The only post that wasn't about how so many books are awful was the introduction post.



Shelley

I can't agree with you more. I don't know who's deciding that a lot of this crap is worthy of being published. I mean, you read the work of a lot of as-of-yet unpublished authors and you think to yourself, "Geez, why aren't THEY published yet?"

Can I just say, sometimes I know something is "crap" and that's why I love it. I want my horrible trashy reality TV, my clichéd Soaps. my scifi movie of the week, and my cheap-ass rainy day read romance/mystery novel.

I'm not always looking my enlightenment or the next big thing or whatever. Sometimes I just want to be entertained, even if that means a bit of a groan here and there. And I'm willing to pay what ends up being $10 a month for a couple books I can breeze through and even laugh at a bit because they don't take it too seriously.

The academic attitude of convention and literature and cinematography and and blah blah blah can go kick rocks. I've been at work all day, I'm on a lil mental break and don't need to think about why all the characters in Salem talk about their schemes out loud to themselves, or why all these teens are barley dressed on a camping trip in the Adirondacks, or why what's-his-face does so much brooding instead of pacing and head scratching too. Because it's sexy. done. because that's how he thinks. done. Because whats-her-face like to watch him do it. done,

So as a "crap" consumer, I can say, it sells because I buy it.

defyalllogic said:

Can I just say, sometimes I know something is "crap" and that's why I love it. I want my horrible trashy reality TV, my clichéd Soaps. my scifi movie of the week, and my cheap-ass rainy day read romance/mystery novel.

I'm not always looking my enlightenment or the next big thing or whatever. Sometimes I just want to be entertained, even if that mean a bit f a groan her and there. and I'm willing to pay what ends up being $10 a month for a couple books i can breezy through and even laugh at a bit because they don't take it too seriously.

So as a "crap" consumer, I can say, it sells because I buy it.

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God yeah, I love a bit of 'crap' now and again. Everything has it's place, and sometimes you just want a bit of mindless entertainment that keeps the brain occupied for a few hours. I love fiction that's difficult, and challenging, and brilliant, fiction that makes me think and grow as a person- about 10 percent of the time. The rest of the time I just want an enjoyable book. Of course, saying 'crap' here, I'm not using it the sense of something that's bad. I read very widely, and I have to say that out of several thousand books I've only read 10 that were actually BAD. And two of those were deliberately awful, so that doesn't count.

Not everything has to be full of life changing revelations and discussions of the nature of human existance, after all. That gets quite dull.

What's rubbish to one is another person's best book.

I can't think of any day at work that had me wrung out enough to make me want to read crap.

You've made a very good point there. Thanks for that. Someone just handed me a pile of books that to me are a waste of space but to a friend of mine will keep her happy for weeks. Likewise, she wouldn't dream of picking up my favourite reads as they'd bore her to tears.

No publishing house wants to lose money, so we have to assume it all has its audience.

Must be something I'm missing.

And - where's that shiny thing?

Goldenleaves said:

Y

And - where's that shiny thing?

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It's over here. No, wait- it's over there!

shelleyo said:

Rubbish.

Now Spot Does Dallas, that was a good book.

Shelley

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It can't beat the glorious bittersweetness of Spot Goes To Rehab.

Definitions of 'rubbish' do differ a lot... though I get the impression that the OP (who I note has not come back to this thread yet... or have I missed it...) is referring to books with literary merit. So, no one is writing Hamlet any more or the works of Charles Dickens...

And yes, I mention those two specifically because, despite being considered classics now and pretty much compulsory in schools, both Dickens and Shakespeare were not considered geniuses so much in thier time. While both gained some level of fame and recognition in thier lifetime, much of thier fame did not come until much later. Most of Shakespeare's plays (the exceptions being the great tragedies) were whimisical comedies to entertain the commoners while Dicken's work was first published in Penny Dreadfuls which were considered the lowest form of literature akin to the Daily Sport or the Weekly World News - again, entertainment for the lowest common denominator. If either were alive today and doing a comparable job, I reckon Shakespeare would be on the writing staff for a Hollywood soap opera or similar TV series while he saved up the money to independently produce the great script he has for an arthouse film about some Danish Prince which so far every production company has turned down as 'too arthouse' while Dickens would be submitting short stories and chapters of serials to e-zines while writing a blog about his search for fairies...

So, it is entirely possible that in the future the works we consider mainstream and commercial will actually be seen as future classics which millions of schoolkids will be forced to read in order to qualify in English (or, Inglizh or textspeak or American whatever they change the name of the language too... ).

As for the OP being a troll... meh, probably. However, trolls can be entertaining... so long as you don't let them off the chain...

Personally I draw a distinction between "rubbish" writing - purely bad writing - and "entertainment". But that's probably largely an issue of semantics.

No idea what a thick tome or big words have to do with quality lit, though. There are classic works of literature with Established Merit that are quite slender and/or simple to read.

quicklime said:

4 posts in total

3 on how everything is crap

2 locked already


I smell a troll

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Not necessarily, sour grapes - potentially.

When I was subbing my first book, I did a cringeworthy thing. I wrote a letter into a writers magazine in the UK that basically went along the line of "how do I get rejections, when this crap is published; wah!!!" If I'm correct my target was chick-lit.

100% sour grapes. 100% cringeworthy. The truth is that the book was unpublishable. I think there is an element of this in the OP's posts.