Where is the bar set?

[EndOfTheEarth]

I'm an aspiring writer. Many of us on this site are. Many of us on this site also cringe at the quality of the work that is produced by our peers.

 

But then, my professor asked me to read the excerpt for this:

http://www.amazon.com/Cartel-Ashley-JaQuavis/dp/1601621426/ref=cm_c...

 

The book has produced two sequels, has gained a hundred forty five-star reviews on Amazon, and has made it to a paperback release.

 

If you read the excerpt, you would also notice that the prose is hinging on terrible, and the plot moves like something a squeefan would have thought up. Even compared to Meyer, this is bad.

 

At the same time, it's being published and sold with notable success. And this isn't a self-publishing company either, Urban Books, the company that this was published under, is a legitimate setup, albeit a slightly new one.

 

Either the expected quality of books has plummeted, or I'm missing something.

 

Thoughts?

[nathan_p]

Jesus Christ, it's the Godfather in Florida.

 

Yeah, I think quality has gone down for what people are willing to publish. People pump out crap like it's going out of style, which is a constant -- but now more publishers are willing to bind crap and sell it.

[o0_flying high_0o]

....

 

That prose is not just bad, it's almost painful to read. 

 

I started out thinking, oh, yeah, well, we've got danger, powerful people who always have powerful enemies, and everyone is drop dead gorgeous. Typical blockbuster.

 

But they need a ghost writer. Or at the very least an editor.

 

I think publishers look to Meyer and stuff and say, who cares about quality, give the mindless drones what they want! Sex! Violence! Pretty people! And a suave, dangerous anti-hero (well... sort of) for the girls to fall in love with. 

The sad thing is it seems to work...

[nathan_p]

Mind you, if I'm reading that correctly, that book was written by two people.

 

That book took two different humans to write.

[EndOfTheEarth]

It's true.

It sparked a debate in class today about quality work, and the debate about where exactly you'd find this in a bookstore, and if that's a good or bad thing, and the racial bits behind it.

 

I announced in class that though it appears as inferior quality, it wasn't surprising, frankly, it's the next logical step down the ladder from quality to accessibility that we've been descending since about 1660.

This is part of my nonexistant dissertation that suggests that in the future, fine literature will be on a kindergarten level, the English language will have devolved back into prehistoric grunts because technology negates the need to speak aloud, and the fashion will be to wear no clothes whatsoever...all based on a linear regression of trends since, again, about 1660.

[o0_flying high_0o]

So it is.... This is a sad day.

 

*nods* Appeal to the lowest common denominator, why bother appealing with wit and intellect when you can just win over the uneducated masses?

XDD Clothes, I can see. But... I don't know if I agree with you about literature. Yes, we've got substantially more crap now, but, now everyone can read. Back then the uneducated... I don't know. Watched street performers, some of the lewder plays. And we don't have audience numbers, or how often/ for how long they were shown. The literature is different. But if everyone was still writing in the same style, talking about the same problems in the same ways as in 1660, well, it'd be dead boring. If we want to access that stuff, we can. And people do. It's still referred to, and recommended. But we have more variety now. Also, a lot of the less profound stuff from that long ago just isn't kept. The best selling books during the Enlightenment and french revolution were not Rousseau's masterpieces, or any other enlightened works, but illustrated stories about Louis XV's mistresses and his erectile disfunction. 

[nathan_p]

(Fuck strikethrough.)

 

Vaudeville! :D Theater was very popular until the rise of film, and even then vaudeville didn't die completely until about the 1920s. There were also traveling theater troupes and religious plays.

 

Also, Shakespeare falls into that weird area between "jesus that's art" and "lol dick jokes". I think maybe the reason he's not as popular now is that we don't talk the way he wrote anymore, so it's harder to peel away the shell of academia and aged language to get to the core of sex jokes/talk about human nature that everyone loves.

 

People have been bitching about society going downhill since ancient Greece, so I dunno that now is the time to worry, really. 

 

(I, for one, am a little sad that less-classy media tends not to survive as well. Classics are important -- but the lowbrow humor and crappy entertainment of another time helps bring a certain life to that period.)

 

ps this post is awful