Self-Published vs. Traditional

 

My view from the cheap seats:

 

When I read an indie book, long ago, for the first time, I didn’t know it was self-published until about half way through it. It was a good story, but badly edited.

At the time, I didn’t know a person could self-publish their own book. Yes, it stirred several thoughts in my head, mainly one, I could do that! Yeah, I could climb a mountain too, but why? Because it’s there.

The ‘because it’s there’, has grown the self-publishing world into a major industry. The general notion people have when they find out they can self-publish is, ‘I can write a book’. That’s poppycock! Writing a book for the first time is not that easy – and add the entire process of editing, marketing, etc. which makes it even tougher.

Fast Forward to the indie world of today.

I look better in person.

Once again – my view from the cheap seats:

The millions of indie books out there is out of control and they are a dime-a-dozen. The stories are, for those I have read, are average at best. I admit have a read a few good ones, but overall, blah, blah, blah. However, the writing style of the books I have read – A+. Editing books has improved greatly, because the industry demanded it. The covers improved, because the competition demanded it.

I won’t talk about reviews – I’ll save that for another post.

Back to the stories I’ve read – I blame the blah stories on world opinion. An internet junkie who (writes and self-publishes) books knows what sells and cranks out what’s popular. Good idea? Yes/ maybe. But you have to hustle the readers and that’s a full-time job. But the stories are crap. Writing a popular genre book doesn’t magically make it a good story. I remember when ‘Zombies’ were the bomb! Zombie books flowed like the Nile River. I credit part of that to the popular Undead TV series. And before Zombies were the always popular Vampires.

It’s amazing how fast books latch on to a trend and flood the market; and now add AI into the mix for speed to the market place and it all becomes a shit storm of garbage, which means the actually really good books rarely, if ever, get noticed.

Indie Recap time:

Old days – stories good – editing bad

Today – stories blah – editing and writing really good and editing good.

For the record, I haven’t read every indie book out there, and I generally stick to fantasy, action, adventure.

The three book trilogy (I know that’s redundant) I wrote are no longer available. They were/ are about what most would call ‘coming of age’. I prefer to label them as ‘about a guy and his life in a fantasy setting with action and adventure’. I didn’t sell very many copies, mainly because I just didn’t care about sales is what I tell myself – the real reason is the genre or (bad writing bad story).

They way I write is why agents rejected my queries. I write like I’m talking to you right now. I love adjectives and adverbs, I love punctuation in all forms, and I use all forms however I want. I would marry a semi-colon if I could. Also, it’s the reason why I sub-titled my books ‘Broke Fiction’.

Okay, that’s my current opinion on the matter and it's subject to change after I read a few more books.

I have a very large TBR pile and little time left to read them all.

Have a great time doing what you like doing whatever that may be.

And always, ‘Write like you mean it’.

 

-jk-