Geoffrey Sperl wrote:>>The publishers are catering to the same
mentality that the newspapers cater to: the myth of the average sixth
grade reading level in this country. The publishers could care less
about the workers - they (for the most part) aren't the consumers.
Geoffrey--
Do you work in publishing? If not, please refrain from making such
inflammatory comments. We do care about bookstore workers, if only
for the most base of reasons: handselling and word of mouth. We
also do not cater to a sixth grade reading level, except for those
publishers selling children's books.
It is true that sometimes titles are changed, with the agreement of
the author. We are in this business to sell books, and if a short,
snappy genre title tends to sell more copies of a book than a poetic
title, let's go with the genre title! And it's not just the
consumers that have to be sold on a title, it's also the
all-important wholesale and chain buyers, who are notoriously
conservative in their buying habits. The consumers can't buy the
books if they don't find them in the stores, and a book with an odd
title and/or an unattractive or weird cover is much less likely to
make it into the stores.
It's very easy to blame the publishers for some current lamentable
lack of quality in SF, but the blame can just as easily be spread
around to the consumers, who seem to prefer to buy media titles, the
increasingly bland supermarket-like bookselling industry, and even
to the writers, because I certainly haven't been deluged in quality
manuscripts from new authors during my tenure here at DAW.
Debra Euler
Assistant Editor, DAW Books
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 25 2000 - 19:06:58 PDT