'Independently published'

[igenlode]

A neighbour's daughter has just had her children's book 'accepted' by Amazon and the mother was proudly showing a copy. Friends very impressed. Of course all this means is that she has submitted a formatted file to Amazon's print-on-demand process and had a (unmistakably self-published) paperback volume emerge automatically out of the other end. I didn't read the book itself, only got a glimpse of the binding and the opening page (plus home-brewed illustrations). It may of course be a work of talent, but the odds are against it, especially when it comes to writing for children, which people tend to assume is easier simply because the books are short...

Sour grapes on my part? Yes, almost certainly :-(

And I haven't even *tried* to get mine published; at least she has gone through the work of formatting and submission and soliciting reviews, even if only from friends and family.

Comments

[igenlode]

This sort of thing is basically vanity publishing, with the difference being that because the 'author' does all the typesetting and layout and computerised presses can as easily print one text as another, as opposed to plates actually having to be set up and kept standing in order for any reprint to take place, the printing can be charged to the readers on a per-copy basis rather than the author having to pay the publisher up front for the work to be done in advance. But there is absolutely no quality control. Anyone can 'publish' a book, or several, and a lot of them do -- I am in writers' groups with some of them and get to see their priceless prose. (But what do I know? At least it gets more 'likes' on social media than mine does...)

There is a very good reason why self-published books have a bad reputation -- it is because people self-publish when they *can't* get their work in print any other way. Whether or not this is because it's dealing with themes that aren't considered commercially viable, or because it is seen as too socially edgy, or because the writer doesn't have the right contacts to get into a closed industry that just wants 'the next...' whoever the last best-selling author was. Or because their work simply isn't good enough quality to jump out of the slush pile, or, worse, because the easy option is there and they simply can't be *bothered* to go to the trouble of editing and revising to a state that might get accepted, when all you have to do is push a button to upload your freshly-regurgitated first draft exactly as it stands, and rush on to get started on the next book in the 'series'. (An amazing number of the other people I see in these writing groups seem to be writing a multi-volume fantasy series, or even multiple series of interlocking books, thanks to the endless supply of 'plot bunnies' that keep afflicting them!)

Because the financial risk involved in modern self-publishing is so low, books can be published that nobody would stake serious money on attempting to produce commercially. And while this is a boon to niche non-fiction, especially things like local history that involve reproducing large numbers of images and that would have previously been disproportionately expensive to get into print for an inherently limited market, it is fairly dire for fiction.

Vast amounts of derivative fiction have always been written; I ought to know, having spent my life writing it, one way or another. And publishers have always wanted a supply of generic genre entertainment, because that is what most of the reading public wants (a book that will be "like the last one, but different"); it's certainly what I generally want. The difference is that self-published books are driven by what the author wants to write rather than by what anybody necessarily wants to read... and while yet again I've spent most of my fan-fiction career, at least, in consciously writing work that I *know* in advance isn't going to be popular (and am currently engaged in spending months struggling with a story that I have every precedent to believe will have no readership whatsoever), there is still a difference between stories that nobody has any interest in reading because of their style and/or subject matter, and stories that are too badly written to be enjoyable even if the subject matter would otherwise appeal.

A self-published book doesn't *need* an audience in order to exist. The author would dearly like an audience, but its entry into print isn't dependent on the hard-headed calculation that it will appeal to enough people to recoup its publication costs. It doesn't need to meet that bar. And that means it doesn't have to meet any standard at all other than the author's own desire to see his name in print.

[watervole]

I've bought two self-pub books in the last couple of years. One was by accident - it was cheap on Kobo and there was nothing to say it was a self pub. I managed three pages. But at least it only cost me 50p

The other was a historical romance with an Armada theme. I think I may have reviewed it on DW. The writer had consulted my daughter among others about some sailing issues, (which was why I decided to give it a shot) but hadn't got any of them to proof read it. So you have a good description of sextant use - followed by a complete ignorance of the existence of portolan charts. Rinse and repeat. I managed about three chapters of that one.

[igenlode]

The other was a historical romance with an Armada theme. I think I may have reviewed it on DW.

*looks* Ah yes, "Inyo's Ring". https://watervole.dreamwidth.org/715062.html

I didn't know about merchant ships not having a crow's nest in that era -- presumably they were solely used as battle tops? (But how rigid was the division between 'merchant' and 'fighting ship' in that unsettled era anyway? I got the impression that the English fleet that was sent out against the Armada was basically all the vessels they could lay their hands on at the time, in the absence of an official Navy -- more like the Little Ships of Dunkirk than a fleet of the Napoleonic Wars.)

I managed about three chapters of that one.

How frustrating :-(

I handle a lot of second-hand books, and I can spot a self-published paperback at twenty paces: the physical proportions, the cover art, the typeface on the spine, the layout of the title, the amount of whitespace on each page and the line spacing are all dead giveaways. (I can only assume that the default options offered by the print-on-demand publishers are not the same as those used for normal print work -- possibly in order to save money, possibly for compatibility with documents generated by MS Word. Indeed I've had people complain of late that documents I create 'look wrong' because they are *not* flush-left aligned at the start of a paragraph with a double line spacing, e.g. laid out like a web browser!)

And I look at the content of the self-published books I encounter, out of morbid curiosity, and I don't think I have *ever* come across one out in the wild, from the deep-space SF saga to the granny memoir to the middle-school fantasy to the werewolf slash soulmate porn, that was any good at all. The layout is an initial giveaway, but it's the content that lets them down.

They are *boring*. They are didactic. They are pretentious and clunky. They are riddled with proof-reading, grammatical and punctuation errors (especially dialogue punctuation). They fail the basic secondhand-book-buyer's test of if I open this book at a random page in the middle and start reading, does it interest me enough for me to care what happens next?

The best one I've seen (or rather was given, by someone who knows the author) managed only to be technically competent. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/70202583-a-moment-of-resistance
The author put vast amounts of WW2 research (plus post-war Palestine and Jewish terrorism) into her novel, but the characters were alternately cardboard and irritating. There was probably a good thriller to be got out of it, or possibly a reflective novel about female endurance and resistance, or a politically provocative book about Muslims, Jews, and brutalised survivors who refuse to conform to the code of victimhood, or even a chick-lit WW2 romance (the book is four hundred pages and could easily form the basis of several of the above), but it doesn't really know what it wants to be. And the author was probably not the right person to write it.

[igenlode]

I think the only self-published books I've seen which I would be inclined to give a pass to are the various slim volumes of wartime memoirs -- the format is still unmistakable, but the prose tends to be more natural, because they are not trying to 'write fiction' (again, it occurs to me that I might level the same accusation at myself...) and the content is generally more inherently interesting, because on the whole people only remember the intriguing and/or entertaining incidents out of five years spent at sea or sitting on an airfield or whatever. They are simply people sitting down and telling stories without any great attempt at structure or a moral message, or constructing a Main Character and a Love Interest and a Plot Arc...and without any expectation of a particularly wide audience.