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     Liberti Moderator Username: Liberti Post Number: 34 Registered: 07-2004 Rating: N/A |
Column: Reviewers shy away from do-it-yourselfers By TERESA K. WEAVER Published on: 10/07/04 From a writer's viewpoint, self-publishing can be the culmination of a lifelong dream. From the vantage point of a book editor at a daily newspaper, though, self-publishing is a sign of the cultural apocalypse. EMAIL THIS PRINT THIS MOST POPULAR I'm kidding, sort of. Technology has opened up countless opportunities for anyone who has a story to tell to print it, market it and publicize it. But just because everyone can publish a book doesn't mean everyone should. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution doesn't review any books that are self-published. Admittedly, the definition of self-publishing — already a slippery little devil — keeps shifting as the technology and the industry evolve. But there has to be a basic standard of writing, of editing, of presentation. We get about 200 books a day in this office, eight or 10 of which fall into the broad category of self-published. On a typical week, we have space to review five books. The math is unforgiving. The space crunch is hardly unique to the AJC. Newspapers across the country are struggling with the same issues, handling an onslaught of books in a very limited number of pages. The self-publishing filter is a common one, in place either formally or not at some of the most respected newspapers. "As an unwritten rule, I don't review self-published books," says Margo Hammond, book editor at the St. Petersburg [Fla.] Times. "I know all the arguments against that rule — my favorite is that Walt Whitman was self-published — but it is one I have been glad to pull out whenever I am confronted by a persistent self-published author who can't understand why I'm not interested in his self-indulgent memoir. "In my 14 years' experience as book editor, I can say that, Walt Whitman notwithstanding, self-published books are generally not very good. But then again, neither are most books published by publishing houses." So what's the difference? "Only that the latter provides me with one more gatekeeper to help me choose what to review among the thousands of titles on the market," Hammond says. "I figure that an author who is published by a legitimate publishing house has had to convince at least one other person besides me of the book's worth." For most newspaper book editors, time and space are equal enemies. That's small comfort to self-published authors who don't understand why their hometown newspaper won't review their work, but it's reality nonetheless. "Not reviewing any self-published books is a way of being fair, in some weird way," says J. Peder Zane, longtime book editor at The [Raleigh] News & Observer. "The problem with a book is, you can't read just five pages . . . it's not like a record, where you can listen to the first song for 15 seconds and hear the melody, get a sense of whether it's a good song or not, and then go to Song 2, Song 3. . . . Some books don't get good until page 50. In all fairness, a lot of books I've loved start off slowly. "It would be impossible for me to really preview the 10 self-published books that come my way every two weeks," Zane adds. "What I want to avoid is reviewing one because it's a friend of a friend." Newspapers in larger metropolitan areas such as New York, Los Angeles and Washington are better staffed to handle the volume of incoming books and can be a little more flexible in deciding whether to review the self-published. But the competition is fiercer there than anywhere, and so the ones that are reviewed are few and far between. "I suspect there probably are some well-written self-published books out there," says Elizabeth Taylor, literary editor at the Chicago Tribune. Long, long pause. "But they're not flooding into my office." Taylor notes an interesting recent phenomenon: an overall decrease in quality among books published by traditional publishing houses and an increase in quality among self-published books. That's attributable in part surely to emerging technology, but also to the greater use of free-lance editors to work with self-published authors. As the field continues to grow, that may ultimately make some of the filters newspapers use outdated. But for now, they're all we've got. "We never review books from vanity presses . . .," says Oscar Villalon, book editor at the San Francisco Chronicle. "The reason is simple: These books aren't ready for prime time. Any book, no matter how dubious its quality, will be packaged and shipped out by these folks — for the right fee, of course. . . . "I think some folks who go through vanity presses understand that, and just would like to see their remembrances bound up nicely in a book of some sort — something for their children, say — and that's perfectly fine. But some people . . . suppose that that's how the publishing industry works, that there's no difference between a book published by Knopf, say, and one from an online print-on-demand vanity publisher." Sam Hodges, book editor at The Charlotte Observer, finds conversations with self-published authors "the worst part of my job." "These are well-meaning people who are just really frustrated that this story that means so much to them can't break out and get attention," Hodges says. "And I have to explain to them the realities of space and how competitive the book business is." Hodges does have a policy against reviewing self-published books, but he allows for exceptions. "The thing that haunts me — that keeps me from having too haughty an attitude — is that I think there probably are really fine books that don't find a publisher these days, in part because the writer may not know how to work the system well enough, may not have an MFA or some sort of entree into the agent-editor world," Hodges says. "I see so much inferior stuff published out of New York, my heart is a little bit with some of these strugglers." He cites a recent example, a memoir by a 97-year-old local woman. "It looks pretty good," Hodges says. "Just that she would be able to finish a book at that age is kind of remarkable. And she comes from an old Charlotte textile family, so I know there would be some interest in the book. . . . I have entertained the idea of doing a feature story or a column about her. But I'm reluctant to do it just because of the kind of calls it will yield. You know, 'You did it for her. Why won't you do it for me?' " In New Orleans, a city unusually blessed with gifted writers and artists, Times-Picayune book editor Susan Larson bends her own self-publishing ban as needed. "We receive so many more books than we can review that some kind of arbitrary triage is necessary," Larson says. "This is unfair to the one writer who has written a fabulous book and has only been able to [self-publish], but there you have it. . . . "I can count on one hand the number of self-published books . . . I've reviewed in my 15 years here — books that were just so special, so emblematic of our particular culture, or just so well done that they deserved review attention." Recent examples are books by New Orleans photographer Kerri McCaffety (who created her own publishing company) and a gorgeous, informative history of Carnival by Mardi Gras expert Arthur Hardy (who self-published). "There are exceptions to every rule," Larson says, "but they are rare indeed." In the end, Larson's triage analogy is a great one. More and more people are writing books, while fewer and fewer are reading them. Writing is an art, publishing is a business and reviewing feels an awful lot like a scramble to stop the bleeding. |