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The Reader, The Writer, and The Bad Book in the Self-Publishing Frontier

12/1/2012

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I have heard this argument repeated so many times that I feel I need to say something about it. The argument in question comes from two sides. The reader's version states something like "I have bought a self-published book and it was awful. Self-published books have low quality and are badly written. I will never buy a self-published book again!" The writer's version is something like "We self-published writers need to make our work as good as possible because otherwise readers will end up buying sloppily written or edited books that will give self-published writers a bad name. We owe it to ourselves, and to our readers."

I disagree with both.

Let me deal first with the reader. As far as I am concerned, readers are responsible for their purchases. If you purchase a bad product you have no one to blame but yourself. I often think of the analogy of a supermarket. It has products of high and low quality. You walk around with your cart and make shopping decisions based on the quality of the products and your budget. You pick up the items, read the labels, compare one with the other and then make your decision. Why should book buying be any different? So you bought a book and it was bad. Did you read the sample pages? Did you read the reviews? Did you click on the names of the reviewers and check out their other reviews? Did you visit the author's website and read their blog and some free samples? Or did you buy the book because the cover looked good or because it has a high rating on a handful of reviews? The way I see it, the reader HAS the responsibility to find out about the quality of the book they are considering buying. And if a reader buys a bad book I don't appreciate them not owning up to their mistake and chiding all self-published writers in the process.

The argument from the writer's side, although it is a well-meaning call to excellence, falls short of understanding the reality of self-publishing. In self-publishing we are our own boss. We call the shots. The whole point of self-publishing is freedom: freedom from gatekeepers, and freedom to take our work directly to the reader. When you declare that there is freedom, there is someone out there who will use that freedom in ways you won't like. There are authors who put out sloppy books. In fact some do so as a formal strategy where they concentrate on quantity over quality. My approach is to make my book as good as possible within the confines of my personal situation. However, I don't feel I need to embrace a crusading banner and go around trying to encourage others to improve their books for the greater good for the simple reason that I am not a gatekeeper. It is my opinion that any pressure to try to make self-published authors conform to a mold sets a bar, and bars are the warp and woof of gatekeeping. The reason we are self-publishing is to avoid this. Of course there are some commonsense guidelines, and writers ignore them at their own risk. But what you do with your book is your own business. You don't HAVE to do anything and much less OWN IT to anyone. This is the way of the self-publishing frontier.

What do you think?
(Photo credit: Vectorportal /CC BY-NC-ND)
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Is Your Reading Experience Colorful? I Mean That Literally.

8/24/2012

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About 2-4% of individuals in human populations have a condition known as Synesthesia. The individuals who have this condition perceive a sensory stimulus with aspects of a different sensation. The most common synesthesia is the one where sounds or letters or numbers produce the sensation of colors. A person with synesthesia may perceive the number 8, for example, as “red” even though the number itself is printed in black. The nature of the condition varies from person to person, but it tends to remain constant within the individual throughout their life and affects both sexes to the same extent.

It is not known for certain how synesthesia occurs. Brain imaging studies have confirmed that in people with color synesthesia (synesthetes) some black and white images tend to activate an area of the brain called V4 that is involved in the perception of color. Also some studies have found anatomical difference in the brains of synesthetes, leading to the theory that their sensory systems are not isolated from each other as in most people, but rather that there is some degree of interconnectivity among the neural pathways that generate sensation. Other theories posit that everyone is capable of synesthesia, but only a few individuals develop it to a significant extent. It is known, for example, that people under the influence of certain drugs can experience synesthesia. Also people who have lost a sensory function such as sight can experience flashes of color in response to touch.

Whatever causes it, synesthesia tends to run in families, although not all family members will have the same type. More interestingly, however, there seems to be a higher prevalence of synesthesia among creative people like artists. There is also some evidence that synesthetes tend to have better sensory processing and cognitive abilities compared to regular people.

An interesting question is whether synesthesia is an exclusively human trait or whether it is also found among animals. A couple of years ago researchers identified a gene in mice called α2δ3 (alpha-2, gamma-3) that is involved in the perception of pain. Researchers created a line of mice missing this gene and found the animals had decreased pain perception because the pain stimuli were not relayed appropriately to the higher processing areas of the brain. However, when the researchers did brain imaging on these mice they found that stimuli that would cause pain in normal mice, activated the visual, olfactory, and auditory centers of the brain of the mice missing the gene. The absence of this gene made the mice see, smell, and hear things in response to pain, in other words: synesthesia!

Research into synesthesia is ongoing and in the future it may yield information that may allow us to better understand the inner working of the human mind. On the meantime, if you belong to that 2-4 % of the population that has synesthesia, I hope that reading this post has been a colorful reading experience!

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