Mia: Questions

This post was originally just one block of text with some random line breaks, but I decided to put some section headers so it looked more manageable. So, onwards to some questions and thoughts about what we've learned thus far:

1. Agents

In this course, we've talked a lot about publishers, writers, and editors, but what about agents? We read a bit about what they do, and I think I understand where they stand in the entire publishing process, but I think it'd be interesting to get a more in-depth look at what they do.

2. Self-Publishing
My second question requires a bit of set up, so bear with me.

One time in high school, this guy was invited to speak about cyberbullying because he had written this book called lol..OMG!, which my school thought would be super topical to read in health class. For context, he had made this website called "JuicyCampus.com", where college students could gossip, and as any rational human being with common sense could predict, it became a facet for cyberbullying.

After a lot of negative publicity, including some remarks from Katie Couric, he wrote a book about how he... learned from it? I put this in a skeptic/sarcastic tone, because he really didn't seem to have much remorse and quite honestly came off as a grade A asshole. It became the talk of high school because we wondered how such an insufferable person had somehow been invited to speak and we'd all been forced to read his crappy book. Some kids looked into his book, and turns out, he had published it himself, presumably because no publishing company wanted his book and he made a lot of money because of his horrendous website, so he could.

Anyway, this long story is the prelude to my question: how does one self-publish? What does that process look like? Do you just pay a company to make the book for you, or is it more involved than that? How much does it cost? Why wouldn't everyone just self-publish? What are the differences, pros and cons, etc.?

3. Judging Literary Merit
My last question, finally, is about literary merit. We've read a couple of articles of book reviews, we've talked about how some editors/publishers/agents pick books they believe are worth publishing, but my question is how? How do you know? Liking things, to me, has always been pretty subjective. What goes into knowing if a book is good or not feels vague. There are so many aspects you can take: will it sell? Is the writing good? But what even makes good writing? Is there any way to be truly objective over a book, or will there always be some sort of bias? How does someone become qualified enough to say what's worth publishing and what isn't? Is it just a matter of being well-read?


Geez, this is way longer than I intended it to be. Somewhere buried in this mass of text are three questions? With a lot of sub-questions? Sorry, professor.