'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]

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.