Fast-paced publishing is a new topic of conversation for me; one that was sparked after reading Powerless by Lauren Roberts. While I enjoyed the story, I struggled with the lengthy run-on sentences, needless repetition, and inauthentic dialogue that I had begun to notice more frequently as I moved forward in my reading journey. The question I grappled with while consistently engaging in conversation about publishing is to what extent do these errors fall onto the author? The editor? The reader’s own interest or lack thereof? This conversation, in my experience, has done little to shed light on who is to blame for this recent move towards fast-paced publishing… My theory is that it might be our fault as readers.
I know that when I truly love a book I become hooked. I devour hundreds of pages in a day, scan fan art, and follow the author on social media. While some readers might not relate to my obsessive behavior, I bet they can relate to the feeling of falling in love with another world or character and wanting their story to continue far after the last page has been turned. While this seems innocent enough, I have seen readers commenting on some author’s Instagram pages pleading for new chapters and snippets of the next book in the series when they feel this way. One of my favorite authors, Rebecca Yarros posted multiple photos while in the writing process on her computer, with her children playing on the beach in the background– on vacation. Yarros seemed to succumb to this push for content by readers and posted an update stating “One day we’re going to talk about this whole work/life balance thing. Maybe not today. But someday” (Yarros July 28, 2024). My point is, authors are being pushed for content daily by readers…but most likely their publishers as well who undoubtedly seek the profits of an engaged and hungry fan base.
And what comes with a rushed author? A rushed editor… that’s for sure. There is so much more that goes into the editing process than just grammatical fixer-uppers and sentence re-arrangement. Editors are working with authors every step of the way. Think of them as the helping hand– they provide feedback on the structure, narrative, characters, pacing, plot, writing style, and of course the expected grammar usage and punctuation throughout. Editors are the backbone of a novel! Yarros, after expressing this stress in relation to her work-life balance, addressed an error in one of her books where a character was thought to have a power that he did not. Her response was simply, “oops.” “Oops” is right, however, it makes me question as a reader how are editors and authors letting these things slide?Â
Consumerism. Trends, marketability, and the rise of social media all coalesce into a perfect storm of quickly turning, run-on-sentence-filled pages. As publishing houses become less involved in marketing, authors are relying more and more on their social media presence to garner attention and support for their books. But with this comes many other influences; both good and bad that in my opinion have exponentially quickened the desire for new media consisting of both short and long-term content. Social media invites commenters to authors’ pages– like Yarros– that place stress directly onto the author, increasing their mental workload and desire to appease.Â
Along with this, social media has been pushing fantasy novels as its most recent media-consumption trend (others have been television shows, movies, self-help books, etc…). A struggle that comes along with this particular trend that has surfaced out of the COVID boredom is that there is only so much originality to go around. Of course, there will always be new and interesting elements to any fantasy novel, however things such as magic systems, battle scenes, government types, etc… are hard to vary within the genre. This inherently allows authors to gain inspiration from others within the field, sometimes almost too much like in the case of Lauren Roberts whose book Powerless is rumored to be a copycat of the Red Queen series. Thus, feeding into the endless, consumerist cycle that is media production post-COVID.Â
Fast-paced publishing… or should I say; consumption, has in my opinion become a product of the society we are in. The faster we consume, the faster they push, and the faster we consume. When placed in a cycle like this, it’s hard to blame one entity– to search for answers and corrections from a system that produces those same questions and errors. And to this, I say the person to blame is probably myself! If there is a way for the reading community to slow down for a moment and take a breath, perhaps get a library card, and savor the pages (even the ones with the run-on sentences,) we might come to see a change. The slower we go, the more thought and attention we give to the story and our beloved characters, the more time our favorite authors have to write our next treasured series, and the more time and patience we allow editors to truly work their magic… What a beautiful system that would be.