Bad Authors

The Chronicle: 6/29/2007: No Bad Authors

By the time I left publishing, in the mid-90s, I had decided there were no bad books, only bad authors.

That, of course, is not true. There are plenty of bad books. But after a dozen years in the industry, the whining and whingeing of authors had worn me down: The conspiracy theories about how a publisher set out to ruin an author's career by not sending his 15-year-old book to a small regional conference; the notion that a publisher sullied an author's reputation by giving her a red cover; the complaint that there were not enough ads promoting the book (there were never enough ads); the indignation that we didn't get the author reviewed in The New York Times, or booked on Oprah.