Darn books these days
Aug. 24th, 2025 11:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
millialaniTerrible books have always existed, and will continue to exist for as long as people write books. The word "slop" has begun to be used for those things that range from bad to incredibly average, done quickly and carelessly and put out to fill a quota, and it's one that applies to books as well. I remember rows and rows of cheap and badly written mystery novels that go nowhere, and the same story about young women meeting a rich domineering man written over and over again by different authors with different covers, and nowadays, I find rows and rows of books about ghost stories that go nowhere, and the same story about a young woman who finds love with a domineering fae prince by different authors.
Yet there is still a marked difference in quality I can take note of. Very often I've started a book and wondered if it was self published, so I can cut them some slack for the occasional spelling error and bad sentence structure, but most times I find that they've all gone through traditional publishers. And yet so many of them read as though they were first drafts that accidentally got printed, or that the editor who read them did it while half asleep. There are far too many errors, some of which could be very easily solved if someone had pointed out it could be written just a bit differently.
Perhaps this is also survivorship bias in a sense. The truly awful books from before may have been filtered out through public opinion before people cared to shelve them, but now with the age of the internet, these books don't have to travel through vigorous marketing and word of mouth to make it's way to everyone's front page. I don't know what or which it might be, I'm just very tired of picking up 4.5-5 star rated books people have been raving about only to be met with something I wouldn't allow to leave a draft document, let alone be printed.
Yet there is still a marked difference in quality I can take note of. Very often I've started a book and wondered if it was self published, so I can cut them some slack for the occasional spelling error and bad sentence structure, but most times I find that they've all gone through traditional publishers. And yet so many of them read as though they were first drafts that accidentally got printed, or that the editor who read them did it while half asleep. There are far too many errors, some of which could be very easily solved if someone had pointed out it could be written just a bit differently.
Perhaps this is also survivorship bias in a sense. The truly awful books from before may have been filtered out through public opinion before people cared to shelve them, but now with the age of the internet, these books don't have to travel through vigorous marketing and word of mouth to make it's way to everyone's front page. I don't know what or which it might be, I'm just very tired of picking up 4.5-5 star rated books people have been raving about only to be met with something I wouldn't allow to leave a draft document, let alone be printed.
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Date: 2025-08-24 05:43 pm (UTC)