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But beyond the sheer entertainment value of a dust-up among the literati, these gatherings take the form of literary carnivals, luring eager and paying students with tales of The Da Vinci Code, The Christmas Box or The Horse Whisperer, suggesting that publishing is a crapshoot, rather than a craft that demands talent and work.

Damned Mob of Scribbling Women: Making Love & Books
Every generation has its writers who rail about the collapse of literature.
By giving the public what it supposedly wants, has the modern-day publisher jettisoned literature, abandoning a commitment to transcendent works in favor of celebrity memoirs, celebrity novels and celebrity children's books, most of them ghost-written in the first place? And given the needs of these corporations, whose often-foreign overseers demand high returns-on-investment to pay off loans, has the the editor been superseded by the marketing manager and the publicist, desperate to place an author on "Oprah" or "The Today Show" to ensure a book's mass success?
If Maxwell Perkins, the most venerated editor of the 20th century, were to appear from the dead, he would fail to recognize an industry that once allowed him to sign up budding geniuses such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe and the young Henry Roth. A large advance, at least six figures, is required for a book to be taken seriously.
As publishers increasingly prefer to pay big advances to an anointed few, editors quickly learn that the only way that their books will command attention is through large advances.
· Indeed, a trend has emerged in which proposals are "gussied up" -- repolished and rewritten -- often by people other than the actual author

Admit it. You haven't picked up a book for weeks or even months. With work, children, parties, sport, who's got time? But perhaps you can be wooed back with a bargain.
· Bookshops' loss leaders tempt lost readers [link first seen at Books Alive: Delivering characters that I hope will live in your heart. That way I leave a piece of me and my drowned friemds with each of you....]