What's Not To Love?

Clare's post yesterday on the various kerfluffles around the writing world got me thinking about two strains of chatter I have seen in the past week.

First, there are numerous blogs participating in a project started by Patti Abbott wherein blog authors use Fridays to recommend books. Says Patti, "I'm worried great books of the recent past are sliding out of print and out of our consciousness. Not the first-tier classics we all can name, but the books that come next."

On the other hand, there seems to be quite a bit of chatter about what turns readers off. On one reader forum I belong to, the moderator posted a poll asking about bad editing in published books [membership in Delphi forums required]. Here are the options:
• It makes me mad, but what can you do?
• It makes me mad, and I'm going to write to the publishers.
• It makes me so mad, it's putting me off buying books from the worst offenders.
• Other (specify).

At the moment, there's a 60-40 split between "what can you do" and "not buying books from the worst offenders." (If you feel like answering this yourself in the comments, I'll be happy to pass along your comments.)

At the same time, a conversation began in a romance readers forum at LibraryThing about "wallbangers", i.e., books so bad you throw them against the wall. These appalling books range from books with horrendous plots or dialogue, to those with factual errors, to...well, you name it.

In both of these discussions, a good number of people have been turned off entire bodies of work--either they won't read anything written by an author or anything published by a certain publisher. As a writer, I find this both encouraging and frightening.

On the scary side, what if I accidentally publish with one of those publishers people refuse to read? What if I make a mistake and am shunned forever for it? But I can control those things. I research publishers, and the list of those who publish my kind of work who I'd work with is comparatively short. (Compared to what, you ask? Compared to the list of publishers of genre fiction overall.)

As it happens, the ever-helpful Victoria Strauss has a post today on researching small presses. One thing she mentions only in passing, but I would emphasize, is actually reading books published by the press in question. That's usually the first thing I do. And I evaluate every aspect of a small press book if I am considering them as a viable publishing option-- not just the contents, but the price, the design, the paper quality. I am a consumer of books in both the literal and figurative sense and I don't want to put my own work out in a way that doesn't please other readers.

As for the factual stuff turning off readers, well, luckily, research is something I enjoy (witness all the years I spent in school getting useless advanced degrees). Some things I will, inevitably, get wrong, especially in the law enforcement arena, but I hope I won't make the glaring kind of errors people are talking about in these threads.

But I find all these discussions--not just "don't forget about these great books," but also "these books are so awful they left dents in my wall on the way to the trash"--encouraging. They mean that readers are still passionate. Some people, at least, are involved enough in what they read to be both enthusiastic about books they love and angry about books that aren't what they should be.

All that, I think, bodes well for the future of genre fiction, in whatever form it may come to be distributed.