Publishing crap Wednesday, October 18, 2006

We've all done it--tossed a book across the room in a fit of pique. The story doesn't make sense. The characters are unlikeable. Something about it just makes you squirm. Sometimes, it's not even that subtle. Things like 'cuz' in the middle of non-dialogue drives me up the wall. Or dialogue that makes you wonder if the characters should be renamed Pinnochio, they're so wooden.

For the most part, I'm willing to chalk it all up to 'diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks.' But lately, I've been realising some of it is just laziness.

Maybe I'm getting old, but I certainly recall hearing stories: someone sent a story to a publisher, and used the wrong type-font. It went, unread, into the garbage can. Mis-spelled the editor's name? Grounds right there to drop it into the trash. Granted, some of these might be the hyperbolic stories told to newbie authors in an attempt to keep us on the straight and narrow, but--wouldnt you rather err on the side of caution?

It seems to be a popular attitude that you can submit whatever you want. In whatever format you want. Edit it? Why bother? Publishers have editors on staff. No, apparently the writer's job is just to tell a story, and if it sounds like my four year old telling me about his day at school, well that'll be fixed in editting.

And in this day and age, how hard is it to hit select all, and change the font to match a publishers requested format? How hard is it to spellcheck? Granted, I might not always run every blogpost or email through my spellchecker, but I'm pretty careful as I type. Even with this post, I've removed any time I wrote things like...thing slike... And you better believe if I'm sending an email to a potential publisher, I'll run it through spellcheck. It might even go past my CP to make sure it's okay.

Maybe I was wrong earlier when I said it was laziness. Maybe it's egotism. I mean, if I really believed that what I had to say was so important, so completely unusual and brilliant that you'd all ignore tpoys and bad snetecnes, jsut raeding becuase you were so enthraelled in waht I had to say...well, I guess if my ego was that big, I wouldn't be so careful.

Or am I misreading it altogether? If it isn't lazines or egotism, what is it? Why is that writers would allow themselves to publish crap?