Two of the most common complaints about the publishing and bookselling world are that easy self-publishing is flooding the market with junk, and little independent bookstores are dying.  Can’t these things help take care of each other?

Self-published books don’t have the same filter on the front end.  There’s not necessarily an experienced editor polishing the work until it shines.  There’s no one rejecting books because they aren’t marketable.  So we have a lot of self-published books that only a mother (specifically, the mother of the book’s author) can love.

But small bookstores are fantastic filters on the back end.  Now, the image of the helpful clerk picking the perfect book for a customer after a thirty second conversation may be romanticized a bit.  But a bookstore full of employees who love to read, who read all the time, is a wonderful tool to cut through the self-published forest and pull out the stuff that’s really worthwhile (or even just really appropriate for the customer at hand).

Complaining about both of these problems at the same time is a bit like complaining that it rains all the time, but no one will buy your umbrellas.  Either it’s not really raining as much as you think it is, or your umbrellas aren’t very good.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 at 10:12 am and is filed under Indie bookstores, Innovation, Market Competition. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.