Adderbox76

No worries. I freely admit that my entire opinion on the subject of self-publishing is elitist and condescending as all hell. So I can put on my big-boy pants and take a bit of my own medicine back. No worries.

But no, I didn't take your response as condescending. You're right that a person can sort and filter. But a filter should almost be an option, not a necessity. I'll happily sort by genre, or page count, or yes...even ratings, to find something interesting to me.

But I shouldn't have to have a button that says "sort out any crap that hasn't even gone through a cursory elementary school grammar course". There's a line in the sand of what should and shouldn't be acceptable in any business environment that nominally wants people to spend money with them, and "making my customers weed out unprofessional garbage" should (IMO) be that line. Amazon, Kobo, or wherever, should at the bare minimum be telling people front and centre, "this is the minimum level of quality you can expect...feel free to sort however you like, but we at least guarantee that every book will meet a certain level of literacy."

I admire your optimism about cream rising to the top. But I just can't share it.

The average person isn't going to spend an hour digging through a literal trash-heap on Amazon in order to find something worth their time. They'll give up after five minutes of reading terrible review after terrible review and then go find something else to do with their time.

And thus the collective intelligence of humanity drops; not because they're actually reading all of this white noise of self-published crap. But because they're not reading at all because of the effort it takes to weed through it at the book store (digital or otherwise).

The best example I can give is how "Oprah's Book Club" (am I giving away how damn old I am yet?) got people reading. They read because they didn't have to go and find this stuff themselves. Someone curated it for them, told them "Hey...this is good".

If the average reader didn't have Oprah and had to dig through five thousand Amazon self-published "suggestions" before stumbling onto Toni Morrison or Push by Sapphire, they're quickly go doom scroll Facebook instead.

Like I said, I admire your optimism and a part of me wishes I could share it. But the idea that the lack of any accountability for self-"published" drivel completely muddies any real "discover-ability" of the actual good stuff is a hill that my elitist ass will happily die on.

But if some are as bad as you say they are, then they’ll get rejected all the same

Oh I don't disagree with you on that.

However, because the barrier to entry is gone, and even financially there's no barrier to getting your work out there, even rejection isn't enough to curtail the slop.

First "self-published" novel got 1 review that literally called it "an atrocity worthy of the Nuremburg trials"? Who cares. Publish that sequel...and the sequel after that. There's literally no incentive to get better and no dis-incentive to prevent it no matter how crap the work might be.

The only real incentive anymore to stop publishing your glorious 12-volumes-and-counting epic story about a space wizard that has never actually sold a single copy is literally self-shame, which, in art circles, is not a common commodity.

So regardless of whether or not they are being read, or purchased, they're still just taking up more and more space. Adding more and more static to the crap that the future is going to have to sift through.

To me, anyway, it has less to do with gate-keeping and more to do with curation.

Well yeah...that's the "love" part. It would be false advertising if they took Jeremy away but still insisted it contained love.

Listen, the Waukegan Township homeless problem isn't going to solve itself, you know...

Writing is so much more than just art though. Writing is also education. Writing is also a chronicle of culture and of history. Writing educates us about our past and our future and our present in a way that goes beyond statistics, dates, figures and memorised names. It, in a way that other art forms can only touch on, enriches our understanding of ourselves as a species and our place in the world

We know, at least in part, about Antebellum south, not just by reading history texts, but by reading Mark Twain. Our knowledge of the dustbowl is similarly enriched by Steinbeck. Thanks to Homer, Ovid, and others, Ancient Rome isn't just dusty stats and numbers, it's a living breathing history that you don't get from history books. Thanks to Orwell and Huxley we can look at our present world and see warnings rather than being completely blindsided by current events.

THAT is the power of writing.

And you're saying that this generation's contribution to that; this generation's contribution to the future's understanding of us is some asshole's Edward Cullen Slash fic?

That's ridiculous.

Am I elitist in this opinion? ABSOLUTELY. UNASHAMEDLY. It's too important NOT to be.

You want to write your own dumb-ass crap, that's perfectly fine. We ALL did that. We used to write it, share it among our friends and family, have a good laugh about it, and then put it in a drawer and never think about them again. I myself have a filing cabinet FULL of those things.

But what we didn't do (at least not in the mass numbers technology allows us to do now), is enshrine those horrible pieces of shit into the zeitgeist just because it's free to do so on fucking Amazon. We didn't pollute this generations contribution to the future with our own laugable crap just because we could.

Some people eventually got good enough that our work deserved to be included in that zeitgeist, even if it was just a couple of short stories making it past the so-called "gate-keepers". But more of us didn't, and never would.

We still write, because you are absolutely right in that a person who wants to write their own crap without bothering to learn, or get better, or even understand what makes good writing "good" in the first place, is welcome to do so. It's a very welcoming art form in that respect.

But leave what gets remembered by history to the people who are actually fucking good at it.

Someone please put razor blades in this fuckers twelve daily bigmacs already please.

I believe OnlyOffice may be problematic from an ethical perspective if I remember correctly because of Russia or something. But it's FOSS, has a linux desktop version, and its compatibility with Excel has been absolutely rock solid for me.

You realize that most functional adults have the ability to focus on more than one person at a time right? Just because mom is taking a moment to wipe some spit off of babies face doesn't mean she's not listening to the person on the other side of the table. And the idea of that seems to be exactly the OP's deal (and yours, apparently)

It's not the "doesn't like kids" aspect that makes them the asshole. Hell, I don't like kids. It's the "I'm competing for that person's 100% attention" when I "grace them with my presence" mentality of the post that makes them the asshole.

I'm not a fan of kids either. But hey...guess what? Not being willing to put on your big boy pants and suck it up for an hour is the very definition of "being a selfish asshole".

The fact that the first thing you talk about is how those kids are "going to be the focus of the occasion" (your words), shows that what you lack isn't "enthusiasm about catching up with someone". What you lack is basic human empathy.

From an artistic perspective, self-"publishing" (and I use quotations quite on purpose), changed writing as we know it and drastically dropped the average reading level of the public since now any chimp can bang their fist on a keyboard for an hour, upload it to Amazon and call themselves an "author" beside Stephen King or Umberto Eco.

It was always hailed as "the end of the so-called gatekeepers". Without stopping to realise that gatekeepers/publishers exist for a reason. So that the public zeitgeist isn't completely overrun with utter crap.

The response to having your short story or novel rejected used to be "okay...I'll learn, practice and get better for the next time." Now, it's "screw you...I'll pollute the zeitgeist with my 3rd grade level grammar nightmare with or without you and put it right up there on the shelf next to the actual writers."

Just imagine if a doctor flunked out of med-school, and instead of trying harder, just said "screw you, I'm going to open up my own surgery and put it right next door to you and there's nothing you can do to stop me...."

What a crazy stupid world we live in.

I don't drive an F-150. I drive a quarter-tonne specifically because I wanted to balance my need for a truck while lessening the impact as much as possible. That's called "working within the construct of reality" because as a homeowner, I need to make those kinds of decisions.