“Slush Fatigue” Fatigue

Thursday, June 24th, 2010 | Posted by: Henry Baum

I like this post I wrote at the Self-Publishing Review regarding Laura Miller’s post on Salon - her theory is that the onslaught of self-published books being released out into the wild will lead to “slush fatigue” and it will be hard to separate the wheat from the chaff.  Does she think that self-published books shouldn’t be released?  No, so really she’s complaining without offering any solutions.  A better proposition would be: this is the brave new world of publishing, this is how we navigate it.  Instead she complains.

And the post has gotten much traction.  Stephen Elliot at The Rumpus calls it “excellent.”  The Atlantic doesn’t make much of a criticism either way - her pov, the mainstream view of self-publishing, is left standing.  Basically, it’s a snob’s point of view (and this is coming from, basically, a snob) that what oh what do we do when the peons are publishing and bad writing is flooding the airwaves.  Answer: that’s already happening.  It’s called publishing.  Now there’s just more of it.  The truly ridiculously awful books will be as forgotten as a truly, ridiculously awful blog, mp3, or Youtube video.  At some point, people are going to start seeing that there’s no difference between books and other media.

Here’s what I wrote at SPR:

The article makes the age-old severe generalization that self-publishing is full of “inept prose, shoddy ideas, incoherent grammar, boring plots and insubstantial characters — not to mention ton after metric ton of clichés.”  The better point it makes is, “if the prophecies of a post-publishing world come true, it looks, gentle readers, as if that dirty job will soon be yours…this possible future doesn’t eliminate gatekeepers: It just sets up new ones, equally human and no doubt equally flawed. How long before the authors neglected by the new breed of tastemaker begin to accuse them of being out-of-touch, biased dinosaurs?”

That’s true, but I prefer the democratization of many, many bloggers and readers making the decision about a book’s success via consensus, rather than that power being put into the hands of a dwindling number of editors.  She’s absolutely right that this system will still reward a certain type of book – mainstream-style books will always be successful, even if the books are published independently.  Independent doesn’t always mean cutting edge.

Where this post misses the mark is that it’s coming at self-publishing from a literary fiction standpoint – i.e. “good” writing.  I’ve given into the fact that the success of self-publishing rests on commercial fiction becoming successful via the self-publishing route.

The fact is when it comes to “inept prose,” many readers don’t care. Inept prose is very frequently extraordinarily popular.  Setting aside Dan Brown or Stephanie Meyer – who are monstrously successful – there’s a much larger wing of midlist authors that are doing very well regardless of the quality of their prose. Saying “quality” is subjective is too easy – it’s very obvious when something is more plot-based than character-based. And more often than not, plot-based fiction is not as caught up in sentence structure.  So: self-publishing is on the map for the express reason that “low quality” prose (by Salon.com’s standards) is successful.  One person’s slush is another person’s beach read.

Yes, there is true slush – something that misspells words in the first sentence.  But this type of book will largely be forgotten.  It’ll get limited traction, so most readers won’t have to take the time to wade through it.  A reader should be able to tell a book’s quality from the types of reviews and an excerpt.  Sure, this is more work for a reader, but it also gives more power to both the reader and the writer, as they’ll be making the decisions about a book’s future – not an editor who may be selecting books based on dubious criteria.

All in all, articles like this fault self-publishing for not being perfect.  Flooding the market with bad writing is a side effect of this democratization – just as someone who’s elected might not be the “best” person for the job, it’s still a good system of government.  In the old system of publishing, it’s like only a handful of people selecting who should be in office. That’s just not a fair system.  If “slush fatigue” is the worst side effect of self-publishing being a viable option, this is a fair trade off for good books not being released at all.