Friday 6/14/24
A lot of people have and use four names now. I see this all the time. And each name will be a giant name. That doesn't seem arrogant? Expecting someone to know, use, and write out your four giant names?
For some reasons, many links to videos pop up in my various feeds offering to show me how to win any street fight I'm in. What does the computer think I'm doing?
This would seem to be self-evident, but it's not to the people in publishing, but: You actually have to try and give your book, or your story a good title. It shouldn't be something stupid. You're not being cute or clever or deep. Here's an example of a title of a book from someone who didn't adhere to this principle: This. This. This. Is. Love. Love. Love.
It's amazing that one would need to say this, but the title of your book should be something that people can remember and say to other people. "There's this book you should check out called..."
If you have a title that no one can remember, and no one can write or say, then you have a terrible title. There are all sorts of criteria that go into having a good title, but people being able to know your title should be as basic as it gets, but these people suck so much at what they do that this often wouldn't enter their minds.
I'll be talking more about that above writer later, because we'll be how National Endowment for the Arts grants. None of these things--the NEA, the Guggenheim--are an actual competition where work by one author (and their careers and possible futures) is evaluated and compared to work by another. This is easy to prove and I'm going to expose the NEA. Everything is rigged, preordained, set up, orchestrated. There's no open competition, there's no evaluation. It's all in the bag from the get-go. Same with the Pulitzer.
There is virtually no place in the field of publishing, at any level, such as it is, where anyone is honestly reading work and assessing its quality and its potential appeal and making determinations as to what gets put forward, hyped, marketed, selected, awarded, because of those assessments: 1. Is this good? 2. Would people like it? 3. What does this offer people?
If the books and stories by authors were replaced with logs of deli meat--that is, instead of a novel that person had a big thing of salami--the same puff piece book reviews could be written, the same Guggenheim would be awarded, the same words of praise would be used, the same "best books of the summer" lists would feature this person, the same number of people in the industry would lie about loving it and instead of a book there'd be a fatty meat log.
Do you understand? That book as a book need not even exist. It's just a symbol of what you're supposed to say about that person. It's no more read than the meat log would be read. It's not there to be read, it wasn't written to be read. No thought was ever given by author, agent, editor, publisher, publicist, for any reader.
That it's technically a book with words is irrelevant. The whole thing comes down to the person and what that person represents to the publishing world/community. If all books were vaporized into atoms, publishing would be no different. The people would still be there. Books are a red herring, a feint, in publishing.

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