So, quite recently I became aware that there was a whole world of book publishing of which I was ridiculously unaware. Granted, I've seen Bridget Jones's Diary, and I knew there was a segment of the economy that was responsible for putting a bunch of words on paper, binding them together, and selling them. None the less, I read this article in Slate that talked about book packaging... it's like the "seedy underbelly" of publishing.
I stumbled on this article because I've been trying to read everything I could get my hands on about the escapade that Kaavya Viswanathan took Little, Brown on with her high school hijinks of a $500K advance and plagiarism.
What's amazing to me is that I scan the (literally) scads of books that are in book stores around town and wonder how any book doesn't get published. Also, owing to the fact that I've consumed a fair amount of "chick lit," I know there's a lot of crap out there that isn't that good, but is getting published. How does that coincide with authors talking about how hard it is to get published?
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2 comments:
There's just as much junk "chick lit" as there is junk "guy lit"... the number of "techno-thrillers" trying to emulate Tom Clancy out there is ridiculous... most of them are crap.
As for Kaavya Viswanathan... She's from Harvard... what do you expect (Go Yale!).
Go Boilers!
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