I’m not just a writer. I’m a reader, a pretty voracious one.
In fact, it was reading that nurtured my love for writing. It’s the same for a
lot of authors.
There was a time where getting published was nearly
impossible. You needed an agent with a proven track record of sales, an agent
who had already cultivated a relationship with the big name publishing houses.
As a result, agents were inundated with submissions and publishers took on only
a small number of projects.
Self-publishing was known but not talked about.
Self-publishing companies were referred to as a vanity press, the obvious
implication being that authors were so vain they would pay to see their books
published. Personally, I don’t think it was so much about vanity as it was
about desperation to see your dream come true in any way you could.
The publishing game changed when electronic books and
readers became a reality. It became easier and cheaper to buy books. It also
became easier for all authors to get published. These days you can use sites
like Smashwords to publish your electronic book and they will work with most
major online retailers to get your book into their stores. With these types of
sites not charging authors upfront costs, the authors can afford to put lower
price points on their books, thus attracting more readers and netting more
profits. Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program allows authors to upload their novel
and sell it exclusively to Amazon customers allowing readers with a Kindle
Unlimited subscription to read for free.
With it being so much easier to become a published author, I
have noticed a disturbing trend. There seems to be a willingness to accept a
less than perfect product. In other words, readers are willing to overlook
errors in the novel because they like the story or the author or both. Just to
be clear, I’m not talking about a few errors. I’m talking about books riddled
with errors. Not just riddled with errors but getting multiple four and five
star reviews.
Just yesterday, I was reading a story where the main
character had been in an accident and he needed to be assessed for his
injuries. Instead of assessed, the author wrote he needed to be accessed. The
author also used OK throughout the book instead of okay, which is the correct
format. And in this same book, there was a single sentence in which the word
evacuation was used three times. Imagine my surprise to find this book had a
five star Amazon review.
Authors are also getting away from remembering they need to
show readers what is going on and not tell them. Going back to the story I
referenced a moment ago, there was a lot of narrative in this book with many
sentences starting with “I saw”, “I heard” or “I felt”. These are fine once in
a while, but instead of relying on them to describe the scene, authors need to
show readers what’s going on. Don’t say ‘I felt someone touch me’. Instead, try
going with ‘Rough hands seized my shoulders’ or something along those lines.
Once upon a time agents and especially publishers would
not accept a single mistake in a book. If one happened to get through, readers
took a certain amount of glee in finding it. It was nice to be reminded our
favorite authors were human and made mistakes too.
With there being more independent authors than traditionally
published ones, we have access to more books than ever. That doesn’t mean we
should tolerate errors or be willing to let authors sacrifice quality. I for
one, try my best to produce a perfectly polished book every time. It doesn’t
always happen. Sometimes things get through, and it makes me sick when I find
them, but believe me when I say I invest just as much time on editing as I do
on writing.
Just because I’m an independent author doesn’t mean my
readers don’t deserve the best of me. Lower price should not equal lower
quality.
