Tony Weaver talks about how a publisher's reputation matters more than a book's actual quality in determining success. He reflects on the publishing industry's gatekeeping and the difficulty of getting noticed without established backing.
The most excellent things can go unnoticed. Someone asked me at a panel, what's the most painful thing about being a writer? And I said, the most painful thing about being a writer is that the name that's on the front and the logo that's on the spine matters more than the words that are in between the front and back covers. I can write a book that's the most amazing book in the world, and if it was published by Scholastic and in the Scholastic Book Fair, it'll be a New York Times bestseller like that. But if it's published by a kid in Atlanta calling mixum to do 100 to 200 book print orders that he throws in his trunk and takes to a convention at the World Congress center, it's not going to hit. People ain't going to look at it the same. We like to think that we're objective, but in my experience, it just hasn't been the case.
