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Showing posts from February 13, 2009

Why Everything That Gets Published Isn't Automatically Trash; Or Your Stuff Isn't As Good As You Think It Is

I'm always amused by those aspiring authors who think that most of what gets published nowadays is crap, but who are, nonetheless, desperate to get published themselves. These people are convinced--CONVINCED--that they aren't getting published because they are too brilliant to be recognized by plebian agents and publishers that only put out mainstream crap. To demonstrate their literary superiority, they send letters like this one , which The Rejecter featured on her blog not too long ago: The dynamic for agents is to find that compelling work that is salable, not an easy task I'm sure. For me some books that are considered page turners are often so empty and the characters so thin I don't care what they do and the plot so mundanely crime-ridden or romance-ridden or horror-ridden that I don't care what happens. I could give many examples of such profitable books with their suspense page turners in different genres that the only reasonable thing is for the charact