Ghostcrawler
Expert Driver
Mei Lan said something in a recent post along the lines of being "tired of badly written (fiction)". It is something that has come to irk me recently with all these new authors, and I use that term loosely in some respects, who've appeared and use tiny publishing groups to promote their works on Amazon (and Goodreads), and mainly deal in ebooks. Their main tell is the latching onto current story themes and running them into the ground. The insistence that everything needs to be broken up into series. And the final straw being that these folks, who are barely capable of stringing enough sentences together to form a paragraph and repeating the feat, cannot actually tell a decent story to save their lives.
And my real main gripes are from the results of this phenomenon. I believe that it has really pushed the entire "reading" market to down to lows and feels like a implementation of "no book left behind". The bigger publishers have been grabbing up the most competent of these folks and promoting their work, and while it may be better than most, it's still atrocious to read, and has diluted the market to such that it's hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. And the secondary effect from that is that other readers lash out at the reviews that fail to praise these abominations, upon which the IMDB effect occurs, which is fans of the fiction will highly rate everything they like, then make it a mission to engage in trying to bury and discredit other reviewers for not feeling the same, so the entire review system leans heavily towards over praise of all that is bad.
So here's my question portion:
1. If you love to read have you become to feel that looking for something "new" has become a chore?
2. Do you feel that more often that you've been disappointed in your "new" choices more often than in the past?
3. When you look for a new book do you filter down to all the lower reviews and look for a common theme, and tend to just skip the higher reviews that sing too much praise?
4. Have you stepped out of your reading comfort zone to try new things that you're unsure if you might like or do you try to persevere in finding something decent in what fits your tastes?
5. IF you find something that fits what you like, is a new author (or one you've overlooked), and it's actually decent does it feel like a victory? But then you find yourself looking for everything that author has done and binge on it?
And my real main gripes are from the results of this phenomenon. I believe that it has really pushed the entire "reading" market to down to lows and feels like a implementation of "no book left behind". The bigger publishers have been grabbing up the most competent of these folks and promoting their work, and while it may be better than most, it's still atrocious to read, and has diluted the market to such that it's hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. And the secondary effect from that is that other readers lash out at the reviews that fail to praise these abominations, upon which the IMDB effect occurs, which is fans of the fiction will highly rate everything they like, then make it a mission to engage in trying to bury and discredit other reviewers for not feeling the same, so the entire review system leans heavily towards over praise of all that is bad.
So here's my question portion:
1. If you love to read have you become to feel that looking for something "new" has become a chore?
2. Do you feel that more often that you've been disappointed in your "new" choices more often than in the past?
3. When you look for a new book do you filter down to all the lower reviews and look for a common theme, and tend to just skip the higher reviews that sing too much praise?
4. Have you stepped out of your reading comfort zone to try new things that you're unsure if you might like or do you try to persevere in finding something decent in what fits your tastes?
5. IF you find something that fits what you like, is a new author (or one you've overlooked), and it's actually decent does it feel like a victory? But then you find yourself looking for everything that author has done and binge on it?