On recieving conflicting critiques

[Interference]

Can you imagine what would have happened if he'd bowed to current standards of criticism? (Cleverer folk than me can insertify an appropriately parodical clavical here)

 

[Brian G Turner]

Two words: James Joyce.

Books such as Ulysses were a product of their time: the wave of modernism sweeping the Western art world as a rejection of the classical after the horrors of WWI.

 

[Interference]

And we are arguably the richer for that.

 

[AnyaKimlin]

To be honest I've started reading a lot of self published works because they don't have the packaged feel of a lot of traditional published books. I choose them the same way I do any other book because it has a good blurb, first few pages read ok and great front cover. I've read some amazing ones that don't 'fit' in the current publishers idea of what works.

I'm not any less enamoured by Grassic Gibbon, Austen, Dickens, Victor Hugo etc just because their writing is no longer fashionable.

 

[Starchaser3000]

I myself chose self publishing because more than enough people over the internet told me that it would be near impossible for me to find a literary agent or a publisher for what I had written. Even if I somehow wrote the golden query letter, I would just be wasting my time anyway. In hindsight I now kind of wished I had at least TRIED to query my work to agents. But the majority of the people on the internet that evaluated my excerpts and summaries of my work before I had it edited and published insisted that an unknown first time author like me with something so blatantly non commercial had no choice but to do self publishing.