Phantomimic's Blog

On the Bad Quality of Self-Published Books

5/12/2011

Author Cynthia Robertson published in her blog a piece about the bad quality of self-published books. She made a lot of valid points regarding this topic but I felt I needed to reply and make some points of my own.

This was my reply:

Hi Cynthia, thanks for stopping by my Scribd article (Self-Publishing and the Shot Heard Around the World) and leaving a comment. I replied to you there, but allow me also to do it here.

I agree that we should strive to be better writers and that a badly written book can be a hindrance to its enjoyment. However, I have two comments to make.

The first is that many people will settle for less than perfection. In fact most people are not so much interested in the English as they are interested in the story, and how it thrills them, inspires them, or relates to their situation, values, etc. This is the point that many purists of the language don't understand.

The second is that most authors do not have the money to pay for a professional editor or other services. Until recently the editors/publishers held every author to their high standards keeping some great stories from being told. With the e-book revolution the difference today is that editors and publishers are no longer the gatekeepers and authors can present their work directly to the readers.

Now if editors/publishers are smarter than their dinosaur distant relatives they will have the good sense to evolve and extend an olive branch to self-published authors. They should approach authors and say things like, "Hey, for a reasonable percentage of your sales, we can edit and format your books and make them better." Then they should also have the good sense to not charge for e-books the same amount they charge for paper books. Finally, inclusion of self-published authors in the best seller lists will be a plus too. When these things happen, there will be a dialogue and an understanding. On the meantime the clock is ticking...and traditional publishing is dying.

Phantomimic

10 Comments

Barbara Alfaro link

5/12/2011 11:28:22 pm

An excellent post. From my experience both as a reader and a writer of ebooks I'd go with the "bad quality" of some ebooks. Many are formatted and edited beautifully. And for those that aren't, you are so right. Most readers forgive a misplaced semi-colon when the story is great!

phantomimic link

5/13/2011 04:11:47 am

Another thing is reader expectations. With so many authors selling even novels for $0.99 it is hard to compete if you price your work much higher, no matter how good your English and formatting skills are. Some people stick to the old mentality that "you get what you pay for". The inference they make is that a $14 novel MUST be better than a $0.99 novel. These people don't understand two things. One is that many competent authors use low pricing as a strategy to get more readers interested in their work and more sales. And two, that e-books are much less costly to produce than paper books and therefore they SHOULD cost less.

Lucy V Morgan link

5/13/2011 11:12:37 pm

I am in support of self publishing, but I have to disagree with a lot of this.

Firstly: some readers are more forgiving of mistakes, yes. Unfortunately, you're still charging for your product, and that means that what you should be providing is top-notch. It's a bit like saying "if I make this cheap, people won't mind if only half of it works." Not a sound business model (never mind the fact that mistakes are just as often present in plot and character development as they are in grammar and spelling, and in my experience, the two go hand in hand).

And this: "Hey, for a reasonable percentage of your sales, we can edit and format your books and make them better." So you mean editors will have to get adept at predicting who's going to sell? You mean editors are going to become kind of like...agents? If you can't prove your sales record with previous books then you're going to be jockeying for what is not a lot of an editor's very precious time. Like...an agent's.

Publishing is hard. Self-publishing is just as hard, if not harder. But speaking as somebody currently reads the slushpile, the vast, vast majority of writers need an editor -- and not just for spelling mistakes. Yes, it's not cheap, but it's incredibly time intensive and most editors spend a long time working for free just to get into the industry. It's already a travesty that most writers have to do similar; why push the problem further up the foodchain?

Ultimately: publishers do not pick up every good book out there, for a multitude of reasons. I support self-publishing for this reason. But I do not support a market that quickly becomes flooded with sub-quality products that the reader is often expected to pay for at the same rate as a book from an editing publisher. It just demeans the work of those with quality self-pubbed products. What's the answer? I honestly don't know. A change to the publishing model -- where editors edit for a percentage, but the publisher still acts as gatekeeper to protect everyone's interests, in a sense -- may well work to get more works published than might through the traditional model.

As for self-publishing...well, I worry about competition and market forces. A market where a reader says "meh, it wasn't that good, but I suppose it only cost me £1" is a very sad one.

phantomimic link

5/14/2011 08:47:46 am

Lucy, thank you very much for leaving your comment. Let me state several things.

When you talk about book quality, what are we talking about? Let's say we gauge book quality on a scale from 0 to 100%. What are you saying, that unless it is say, 95-98% it should not get published? Uh, sorry, by my standards there are stories out there that are so good that they can overcome a book quality of 90 or 80%, especially if they are priced low enough. Some readers will settle for less, others for more. Charging less because something is not as good or because you are an unknown author is a sound business model: if people buy the product. Everyone understands quality, but people have different thresholds as to when price trumps good quality. It is offer and demand, the exercise of the free market at its highest level. There is no one to tell people what is good anymore, no gatekeepers to make a decision for you. Now readers will decide for themselves. What is wrong with that? Every market in the world has high, medium, and low quality products; why shouldn't the e-book market be the same? Quality has not been driven off those other markets why would that happen in the e-book market?

Please, let me be clear. I support the labor of editors, in fact I think that many are overworked and underpaid. We need good editors to make books a better reading experience. However, what I am saying is that in the future business model they will work along with many other people as part of agencies (and some are forming already) that will sell their services to self-published authors for a percentage of their profits. Rather than fight it or deplore the lowering of standards, what people in the publishing industry have to do is to reinvent themselves and find a niche in the new order (in fact, by doing so they can help raise the standards). You won't necessarily have to predict who will sell, you can pick those that have distanced themselves from the pack or you can market their books to make them a success. We can quibble on details but the point is the current model is untenable and it has to and will change.

Jacqui Murray link

5/14/2011 12:03:55 pm

I fall into the category of 'I hate poorly edited books'. Having said that, I become blind to the mistakes if the writing is good/excellent. I get past it and forgive. As an Amazon Vine Voice, we receive pre-publication books that are filled with errors. They warn us, so it's no surprise. I see them at first and then don't as I become wrapped up in the story.

phantomimic link

5/14/2011 11:24:04 pm

Thanks Jacqui, I also get turned off by bad editing, to a point, but like you I focus on the story.

Barbara Alfaro link

5/14/2011 11:56:40 pm

I have purchased ebooks from major publishing houses that were transferred to electronic versions without being formatted correctly for ebooks. Being meticulous and caring about one's work or not being so isn't limited to self-publishers. One of the best features of self-publishing is that if you want to make a correction, edit, or addition to your ms you simply do so and then upload the revision. I am fortunate in that my husband is an excellent editor. Re formatting -- No one needs to pay any "expert" anything to learn how to format an ebook; Smashwords has a free style guide.

Lucy V Morgan link

5/21/2011 07:16:01 pm

Hi Phantom :) To answer your questions:

"When you talk about book quality, what are we talking about? Let's say we gauge book quality on a scale from 0 to 100%. What are you saying, that unless it is say, 95-98% it should not get published? Uh, sorry, by my standards there are stories out there that are so good that they can overcome a book quality of 90 or 80%, especially if they are priced low enough. Some readers will settle for less, others for more."

"Book quality" is very hard to determine because if a book has technical issues (let's not call these mistakes; I'm going to assume the author edits to the best of their ability) then 99.9% of the time, there are plot and character problems too. Either a book is half-way there for me -- ie editable at 50% -- or it's an awesome book (the 98% you speak of). Or it's a bit of a steaming heap :P

Yes, there are readers who will settle for less. Zoe Winters talks about them far more eloquently than I can: http://allindiepublishing.com/author-interviews/zoe-winters-on-ebook-pricing/ (and I don't mean this in a patronising way; I just think she has a very fair point).

"Charging less because something is not as good or because you are an unknown author is a sound business model: if people buy the product. Everyone understands quality, but people have different thresholds as to when price trumps good quality. It is offer and demand, the exercise of the free market at its highest level. There is no one to tell people what is good anymore, no gatekeepers to make a decision for you. Now readers will decide for themselves. What is wrong with that?"

What's wrong with that?

1) Let us assume that most self-pubbed books are rather bad -- because they are. Now let's say you wrote a frickin' awesome story that just didn't get picked up (it happens) and you decide to self-pub, and decide to use competitive pricing. You're already a) lumping yourself in with a market where the vast majority of books are bad and just hoping to rise like a phoenix from the ashes and b) you're already missing out on a huge market because there are plenty of readers who avoid most self-pubbed works due to the probability of them being bad. Yeah, $0.99 is very little, but I can and have found myself buying dozens just to find something worth reading, and that makes that one book rather expensive! In other words: while this model still can work, if you're a genuinely good author, self-pub can be a risk because of the above reasons; statistics still say you're unlikely to rise from the ashes. Sucks, but true.

"Every market in the world has high, medium, and low quality products; why shouldn't the e-book market be the same?"

If you could have a sofa at $500 or a better sofa for the same price, what would you take? That's how the book market used to be (anybody who says "but publishers put out bad books too!" hasn't read a slushpile, and that's where most self-pub books are coming from, lol). Take this away and we make the better quality product aspirational rather than affordable/reachable, and this does a few things:
-- it encourages snobbery (don't you think we have enough of that?)
-- it stops a number people at the bottom struggling to be at the top. They get jaded/the bottoms's quite comfy for some. Fair enough in some cases, but if you're still meant to be setting the standard for other writers/trying to improve and grow for your readers, where's your motivation?

"However, what I am saying is that in the future business model they will work along with many other people as part of agencies (and some are forming already) that will sell their services to self-published authors for a percentage of their profits. Rather than fight it or deplore the lowering of standards, what people in the publishing industry have to do is to reinvent themselves and find a niche in the new order (in fact, by doing so they can help raise the standards). You won't necessarily have to predict who will sell, you can pick those that have distanced themselves from the pack or you can market their books to make them a success. We can quibble on details but the point is the current model is untenable and it has to and will change."

Do I think editors should be more accessible to self-pub authors? Yes, absolutely. But I also think editors have limited time, need to earn money and also don't want their name attached to many projects, lol. Because of this, I think *some* self-pub authors need to make a good effort to educate themselves on the craft of writing in order to help themselves. That'd mean they could utilise the first-chapter critique a lot of eds offer at a much lower price and still come out with a decent product; most problems are evident from the first chapter and a synopsis. As I've mentioned before...a lot of sucky work give the good self-pubbed authors a bad name.

As for editors looking for people who distance themselves; how is this a mark of quality/suggestion of success? And marketing takes up a l

Lucy V Morgan

5/21/2011 07:21:54 pm

Bah...it chopped me off! You have a self-editing comments section ;)

Other point I was trying to make:

-- What's to stop an author lying about their sales/refusing to pay up to a % model editor? Legal action is expensive and most editors are not known for their great wealth, lol.
-- Marketing takes up a lot of time, and if you're marketing a debut self-pub author, chances are they'll bomb (statistically). As a freelance ed, will you be getting much work with a CV full of bombs? Nope. You need the safe bets.
-- I think eds will seek to use the % model as part of a publisher because it's less of a gamble for many reasons; gatekeeping keeps them safe too. I think some writers forget that. Still a gamble though, and some people can't afford that.

I think this is a hard market for writers, but I don't think the gatekeeper model is going away any time soon. I speak as a writer who is currently buried under a slew of rejections, too.

phantomimic link

5/28/2011 10:07:13 am

Lucy, thanks for your comment. I want to apologize for you being cut off by this website (the inner workings of which I still don't understand), and for me taking so long to reply.

In general, the way I see it is that I am less "all or nothing" than you are when it comes to book quality, we just have different requirements.

I read the Zoe Winter piece and all I have to say is that not everyone in the $0.99 crowd are trolls. Settling for 10% quality is not the same as settling for 80% quality, although both settle for less than 98% quality. There are different levels, and different prices, that is what a market is all about. You are free to publish and price your book, but that freedom should exist.

As to your argument regarding charging $0.99 and not being able to rise from the ashes, sorry but I don't think it is true. Many authors start higher and then go low as a promotional gimmick, or to stay on the charts a bit longer and gain more readers, or for other reasons. Others (like Amanda Hocking) started low writing a series to hook up the readers and then went up. If you can stay up in the higher price range, that's great, it all has to do with your personal reality as a writer, your readers, and the moment to be seized in the market.

As to the traditional book market, I think you $500 sofa analogy is a romanticized version of that market. Like you almost correctly implied, many publishers do put out bad books. But you seem to think that all slush piles are the same. One publisher's slush pile may be another's source of valid books. Some great books ended up in slush piles many times. As to writer's improving and growing their readers, again it all depends on what a given writer wants to do. John Locke is comfortable at the bottom selling $0.99 thrillers and making $100,000 plus a month. He is not interested in increasing his prices. What is his reasoning? People that price their thrillers at $9.99 have to prove they are ten times better than he is. That makes sense to me.

As to self-published authors gaining more education on the craft of writing in order to help themselves, well, that helps, but it is not good enough. The market is full of exquisitely written books that don't sell. The really crucial point is connecting with your readers and writing something that will turn them into your loyal fans. You and I agree that a poorly written book will be an impediment to its enjoyment, but we differ on the degree of "poor writing" that can, should, or will, be tolerated by readers willing to buy the book.

To my suggestion that editors/publishers should look for authors that distance themselves from the pack, you asked "how is this a mark of quality/suggestion of success?" I really don't understand your comment. I don't know about quality, but a self-published writer who is selling and has developed a following is what you want to pounce on. If one of these agencies I described existed right now it should have been them, and not St. Martin's Press, the ones to offer Amanda Hocking a deal, not for $2,000,000, but for a percentage of her sales. You mentioned other impediments, but really, not only do these work both ways (also to the detriment of the writers, not the publisher) but they are details that can be worked out.

The bottom line of my argument is that self-publishing has made it easier for people to get their stories out and find an audience without being held captive to someone's opinion of whether their work is good or not. Their biggest challenge is finding their readers, and those that do will be successful.

Phanto

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