Gatekeepers

Here's a quote from Severn House's  website

Submissions--We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts. All submissions should come via a literary agent. 

Yeah, blah blah blah.  Who needs you.

Then I thought if after 15 books published by highly respectable publishers, a stint in television and a WGA award, I can't get a real agent and a real publisher, what the heck is going on?  

 What did I say?  You know what I said.  I said "Screw it!  I can do it myself."

The publishers and agents have delusions of grandeur.  They can afford to cast me off for not meeting their requirements.  Okay.  Cool.  Multiply me by any number of midlist, perfectly competent storytellers who are saying and feeling exactly what I am and turning happily to ebooks.

Let's spin that scenario out a couple years.  More authors are made to feel like dreck and leave this tradpub treadmill scam.  Who's left?  Noobies.  The reading public will have still more crap books they can ignore.

I read (never mind I'm not going to be specific) a historical novel of some kind and it was shockingly anachronistic.  This author has published quite a number of books.  I thought it was unreadable, historically inaccurate and far too chatty and shallow for me to invest my time in.  Luckily I got it from the library.

This is not the first experience of mine like this.  And this is supposed to be tradpub at its finest, doing what it does best, what stupid writers can't do for themselves aka research and edit.  Okey Dokey.

 About an hour ago I was reading a mystery (I'll give you that much) and the English character complained about the French.  These bad feelings between the 2 peoples has only existed for about 1000 years.  Remember

1066?

Normans -1

Anglo-Saxons-0

But the other character in the scene said in response "You're a racist!"

No, nothing of the sort.  The Brits and the French are both Caucasians.  Same race.  The character might have been a countryist but not a racist in any real definition of the word.

I might not read further than this, it's too stupid for me to deal with.  Luckily, another library book.

I can't get past the idea that you could have a whole mystery series based on a donut shop.

http://www.doverpublications.com