04
Jan
The Online Review
I am inspired by a post I read at Grumpy Old Bookman, and am grateful to Leo Stableford for pointing me to it. GOB develops an intriguing and quite compelling argument that an author’s first good book will be the author’s n’th book and that the publishing world today isn’t patient enough to stick with someone that long. He concludes that aspiring authors should knuckle down, get half a dozen books published at lulu, and just keep going. Eventually, the hypothesis goes, reviewers will pick up on the author’s work.
This is very alluring, and I want to believe it’s true. However, I’m afraid of a couple of things. The first is that the online world rewards transience, so I have to believe that online publishing will be even more fickle than the real world. The second draws from Leo’s post about genre filters. I fear that these little apps (which can be used to strip out the dross from likely successes based on key words, phrases, grammar, much as resume filters look for key words) mature, and as they do, become ever more sophisticated. Eventually they become genre reviewers.
And then everyone gets their own reviewer.
But at that point we would no longer need published reviews. Your personal reviewer is in fact a book selection bot. Readers will tune their book selector bot to their existing preferences (books they like, tweaked for more violence, less sex, and a bowl of ice cream in chapter 3) so that it will find more and more books just like the last one you read. All we need is a soft copy iof every book out there. This world strikes me as even less friendly to the aspiring author than the current one. Unless you are willing and able to perfectly ape successful books, you have little chance of a breakthrough!
