I am entirely on the "pro-crap" side, with one proviso: that reviewers and commentators are allowed to say what they like, with no howls of protest or attempts at comeback by incensed authors. This is not aimed at you (of course) and not intended to mean that an author should not be naturally annoyed by negative reviews; but they must be taken in a spirit of fairness, in the sense of "I can print anything I like within the limits of the law - and so can they, even if they honk me off".
Don't think this is a meaningless proviso. Cyber-libel, cyber-defamation, cyber-mobbing and cyber-lynching are well practiced and developed techniques in this lawless Wild West of fibreoptics cables, and a bad writer with a high sense of self-regard is just the kind of person to set them off. It was bed enough in pre-electronic fandom; in a world where anyone in Pago Pago or Ulanbaatar can access a page set up exactly to slander an unknowing third party, fairness becomes an absolute necessity.
some books really are too niche to find a publisher, especially in non-fiction... Tell me about it. http://www.facesofarthur.org.uk/fabio/contents.htm I am still keeping, God knows why, a sheaf of letters from some sixty publishers, repeating in a melodious chorus the exact same statement: Your contention is interesting and scholarly (one guy even praised my Latin, which is rather funny), but 500,000 words and nine volumes are simply too expensive for us to publish. What frustrates the Hell out of me is that virtually every year sees the publication of some moronic and thoroughly unscholarly tome on King Arthur (whose historical figure is at the centre of my research in this book) whose only reason to be printed seems to be that it suits the format requirements. The result is positively degrading to Dark Age British studies; no wonder that the prevailing school right now is the ultra-skeptical one of David Dumville of Cambridge, who specializes in tearing down any theory without building any of his own.
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Date: 2010-08-12 07:17 am (UTC)Don't think this is a meaningless proviso. Cyber-libel, cyber-defamation, cyber-mobbing and cyber-lynching are well practiced and developed techniques in this lawless Wild West of fibreoptics cables, and a bad writer with a high sense of self-regard is just the kind of person to set them off. It was bed enough in pre-electronic fandom; in a world where anyone in Pago Pago or Ulanbaatar can access a page set up exactly to slander an unknowing third party, fairness becomes an absolute necessity.
some books really are too niche to find a publisher, especially in non-fiction... Tell me about it. http://www.facesofarthur.org.uk/fabio/contents.htm I am still keeping, God knows why, a sheaf of letters from some sixty publishers, repeating in a melodious chorus the exact same statement: Your contention is interesting and scholarly (one guy even praised my Latin, which is rather funny), but 500,000 words and nine volumes are simply too expensive for us to publish. What frustrates the Hell out of me is that virtually every year sees the publication of some moronic and thoroughly unscholarly tome on King Arthur (whose historical figure is at the centre of my research in this book) whose only reason to be printed seems to be that it suits the format requirements. The result is positively degrading to Dark Age British studies; no wonder that the prevailing school right now is the ultra-skeptical one of David Dumville of Cambridge, who specializes in tearing down any theory without building any of his own.