Stone

LJ Idol # 18: Unsatisfied

I am a reader, and not in the way that your mom says it when you're a kid and you love to read. I mean it's my job. That's right - I get paid to read what other people write for a living. Every Wednesday I drive downtown to pick up another batch of manuscripts that have been sent to my company by hopeful authors, and I am living what I thought would be my dream. I work in publishing. Not only am I a reader, I am a writer - I'm using my degree toward my job. And I work from home. Lucky, right? A rare job, a diamond of a job.

My week starts on Wednesday morning, when I plunge into the maze of tall buildings that make up our tiny downtown. I arrive at a dingy building and in a seedy elevator up to a cheerless office where I exchange last week's stack of manuscripts for this week's. My company does subsidy publishing, which is also known as vanity publishing. It costs an average of $8,000 US to get a few hundred copies of a book printed. The manuscripts are gems, laying there in my box; they are gems because I may be the only one who ever reads them.

As journalists and writers, you may be feeling sorry for these authors.

Do not.

Their manuscripts are flawed and unpolished. When they are not riddled with spelling errors (even the books that were written by educators) they are offensive in some other way. Dialog is not set apart, nor is it even in quotation marks. Some stories are blatant rip-offs (I once reviewed a manuscript that was based on an episode of That's So Raven, written by a sixteen-year-old boy), and others are hand-written. And these arrive in heaps, week after week from a line-up of starry-eyed authors who, most likely, cannot afford the satisfaction of seeing their manuscripts print and bound.

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