Tuesday, July 8, 2008

A "New" Phenomenon


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?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

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!).

Literature Crazy said...

Go Boilers!