Business vs. Art vs. The Consumer

The business of writing is production-based. The more prolific a writer is, the more product said writer has on the shelves. The more product a writer has on the shelves, the more money goes in the pockets of said writer and publisher. Money, obviously, is a desirable result of this business.

As a reader, however, I’m noticing with increasing regularity that in the rush to put an established author’s product on the shelf, the quality of the writing becomes less of a consideration. Name recognition alone sells the product at a certain point in an author’s career, and as a result, it seems as if the brand name emblazoned on the package becomes the product.

It seems this way because the package is often empty.

I’m currently struggling through a book by an author who has been very influential to me in the past—before she became a huge bestseller. One would think an author’s writing would develop on an upward curve with time (practice makes perfect and all), but since she became a huge bestseller, her writing has become practically unreadable, filled with rookie mistakes that wouldn’t make it past the preliminary judging in an unpublished writers’ contest (headhopping, nonexistent character development, all telling and no showing, and general lack of clarity).

I wouldn’t pay a nickel for this book if it didn’t have the cover on it and I flipped through it at a garage sale.

I paid $7.99 for it, however, because it has her name in big letters on the cover.

From a business perspective, the money has changed hands, so the scheme is a success.

Here’s where it falls apart, though: I’m tired of paying premium prices for bad writing I can find all over the internet for free (if I wanted to read bad writing). I’m tired of struggling through unreadable books. I’m tired of looking at her earlier books on my shelf and wondering what the hell happened.

I’m tired of paying for an empty package.

She has lost me as a customer. No more brand loyalty. No more return business. No more word-of-mouth referrals.

Maybe rabid fanpoodles who think an author can write no wrong are enough to sustain a career in the short term, but how long can that continue as more discerning readers get fed up and start throwing their dollars at other authors who haven’t yet demonstrated a propensity to crank out amateurish, poorly crafted product as quickly as possible in order to make a buck?

I’ve never supported the idea that the publishing industry should put out fewer books of better quality, since it’s an idea usually trumpeted by people whose idea of “quality” pretty much excludes all genre fiction. I firmly believe the more variety available, the more satisfied readers there will be, and the healthier the industy will be. Hell, publish more.

That doesn’t mean more by a handful of bestsellers to milk an existing fan base until they dry up. There needs to be less emphasis on the volume of any single author and more editorial attention devoted to every single book slated for publication. The same quality control standards should apply to every book a publisher intends to print. If it’s not good enough, it shouldn’t matter whose name is on the cover—don’t try pushing it on the consumer until the story inside the package is worth the price printed on the cover.