Cherish the Book Publishers—You'll Miss Them When They're Gone | Postmodern Times by Eric Felten - WSJ.com

Cherish the Book Publishers—You'll Miss Them When They're Gone | Postmodern Times by Eric Felten - WSJ.com: "
The Klondikers of digital publishing are rushing to stake their claims, inspired by tales of the gold to be found in the Kindle hills. A few pioneering prospectors have indeed struck it rich with light entertainments, most famously Amanda Hocking, who is a sort of Tolkien for our times (if Tolkien had been an avid fan of "Star Wars" instead of an eminent scholar of "Beowulf"). Her self-published e-books racked up so many sales over the past year that St. Martin's Press recently signed her for some $2 million."

It's only natural for those locked out to despise the gatekeepers, but what about those of us in the reading public? Shouldn't we be grateful that it's someone else's job to weed out the inane, the insipid, the incompetent? Not that they always do such a great job of it, given some of the books that do get published by actual publishers. But at least they provide some buffer between us and the many aspiring authors who are like the wannabe pop stars in the opening weeks of each "American Idol" season: How many instant novelists are as deluded as the singers who make with the strangled-cat noises believing they have Arethaen pipes?

The e-book era promises us all the pleasure of wading through the slush pile ourselves, even as the pile grows exponentially. Much of that growth comes from eager literary hopefuls making earnest efforts. But spammers are also making their contribution to the teeming digital library. As Reuters recently reported, some unscrupulous self-publishers have begun creating books by the ream merely by grabbing a few pages of text from websites and dumping them into ultraquickie e-books. The authors of such faux tomes can knock out 10 or 20 a day. And even if only a handful of people make the mistake of downloading one of these "books," the spammer still makes enough pennies to keep at it.

Typical is the suggestion of self-publisher Erika Szabo, who in a late-March post wrote: "Let's help each other with reviews. We need them to climb up the 'ladder' in order to sell our books." Alas, this unsubtle proposition doesn't seem to have done much for Ms. Szabo's books—an herbal-medicine guide and a "historical-fantasy-romance novel" about Attila the Hun's aunt. After a month of waiting for some reciprocation, Ms. Szabo felt burned: "I bought 3 books, wrote 3 reviews, liked 8 books and tagged them. I got NONE in return."

Plenty of e-book authors find such come-ons unseemly and rail against them on the Kindle boards. The most vigorous and vocal scourge of review-swapping is a self-published author whose books include "Blueprint for an Escort Service," "Blueprint for an Escort Service 2," and "The Complete Blueprint for an Escort Service."

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