Francis Turner has an interesting personal insight into what's going on at Tor these days, and the nature of the real (as opposed to public relations) problems confronting the company. Here's a brief excerpt.
The good thing (in the faint silver-ish lining of the thunder-cloud category) about the Sad Puppies affair and the resulting fall out, is that it has caused me to evaluate my reading habit and to actually put numbers behind my vague feelings that something was rotten in the state of publishing. If I am not alone (and anecdotal data from comments on various blogs and Facebook pages suggests I’m very far from alone) then traditional publishing and book selling is in a world of hurt that can only get worse. I’m not sure what it would take to reverse the course (for book stores there may be nothing that can be done) but I’m pretty sure that bad mouthing voracious readers and denigrating the authors that write books for them, is not going to be a part of a successful strategy.
There's more at the link. Recommended reading.
Peter
Well, yes. I think I commented earlier that I used to follow the Hugo awards closely, as a way of discovering new authors. Haven't done that for years now, because it's all been PC claptrap. Similarly, I can safely agree to follow the boycott, because I'm pretty sure that I haven't bought any books from Tor in years.
ReplyDeleteMy library of physical books has around 1500 volumes - that's after (a few years ago) getting rid of all the stuff I was certain I would never read again. Almost everything new is indie, with a bit of Baen thrown in. Almost all eBooks, btw. I'm going to ask for a new Kindle for my birthday, because I still use the original model.