You Still Deserve the Best

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.