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By David Rothman

image Do you think that many books from big New York publishers are crap? Are you hoping that e-books can make a difference, without the high costs of transporting atoms?

Well, take a heart in a blog post from Editorial Anonymous: A Blog of a Chlidren’s Book Editor—one of the funniest, truest items I’ve ever seen online even though I know it’s up there partly as a gag.

Oh so accurately EA concludes that a manuscript’s salability has to do with three variables: “quality of writing” (and perhaps research?), “consumer interest in topic” and “degree of celebrity.” In the accompanying questionnaire, where you can plug in the variables to determine a manuscript’s chances, quality counts far less than celebrity.

E-books and social media won’t level the playing field, but maybe they can make it just a little less slanted. What if community mattered more, and big-media-created celebrity mattered less, and the book business revolved more around small books and less around megahits?

Related: Why publishing cannot be saved (as it is), by Richard Nash, in Publishing Perspectives. Also read the angry replies by those more tolerant of the status quo.

(Spotted via a tweet from Paula Berinstein.)

 
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