A Few Lessons Learned from Publishing in America

[Aen Elderberry]

Came across this in the show notes for a podcast I listen to.

A Few Lessons Learned from Publishing in America By Olga Gardner Galvin
http://writingshow.com/?page_id=45

Some things I found interesting, such as "Any author owes it to himself to try every route available to get his book published by one of the big players. Only after he has exhausted all the avenues into the big presses, should he consider alternative publishing."

But overall her view seems rather bleak for authors.

[Aen Elderberry]

This made me laugh.  (From "Podcast: A Small Publisher Bucks the System, Part 2" with Olga Gardner Galvin.)  Quoted a bit out of context --

7:21 into podcast
 
Paula:

Why is it that books that seem so distasteful to the average person end up being called literature?

Olga:

That's a good question.  In my experience in big publishing novels are called literary --now that's the word "literary" not so much "literature"-- literary to give them an excuse to have no discernible plot for stories, which is compensated for by unreadable, pompous style.

(Comments about it being hard to edit a literary book because it will be unreadable and the author will fight about every word.)

When an author has a story to tell it's easier to edit his style and to point out to him where a style may be getting in the way of the story, or may not be doing the story or the character justice, because he has higher goals than this word or this comma [being] just so.  He has a story and a character which are more important.  In a literary novel frequently there are no characters and no plots to fight over so -- [mimicking the literary author arguing with the editor]"Oh, no, I meant this word here, even  it doesn't mean what the dictionary says it means.  No, I'm using this word in a different meaning . . ."

Literary critics put a lot of intellectual stock into being literary.  It's really a very silly distinction and mostly it is propagated by intellectually insecure people who like to be perceived as readers of "literature" rather than of just plain fiction.

[Peter Ahlstrom]

Ha ha ha ha... I dread ever having to work on something "literary" like that.