Hi,
It occurred to me today that we as indies have been fighting a losing battle by trying to argue that indie books are of the same quality as trade published books. Certainly many are, but at the same time a great many aren't. Which means that the quality of an indie book on average is less than that of a trade published book. This is basic statistics, and as long as many indie authors produce poor quality work, there's nothing we can do about it. And readers will know this - let's be honest. They aren't dumb. And if they've been browsing as I do and checked out a lot of books, indie as well as trade, they will have come across some poor indie works.
Those invested in the trade publishing world have of course seized on this quality gap and used it as a club to beat us over the head with. Again, this is their bread and butter we're threatening, so there's not much we can do about that either.
And so we as indies will always be labelled with the stigma of poor quality.
But, and here's where things get turned around, the underlying reason for this difference is the presence or absence of gatekeepers. In the trade publishing world books of substandard quality simply aren't produced - or shouldn't be. But the gatekeepers have been knocking out books for other reasons than quality. And as all of us know, often the reason for their rejections has been commercial success. In short if a book didn't fit in a commerial genre or follow a particular commercial trope, it was unlikely to be picked up.
That means if you want original, fresh work, you're much more likely to find it among indie books than the trade published.
So maybe instead of trying to argue a losing cause and to claim that indie books are of the same quality on average as trade published, we should instead be arguing a winning one. That indie books are fresher, more original, more creative etc. And if those invested in trade publishing claim we produce poor quality work that they would never publish, we as those invested in the indie publishing world argue that they produce formulaic, derivative, generic and unoriginal work.
This is in debating a thing called framing the argument. Showing the true costs of choices etc. So everybody wants better health care but no one wants to pay higher taxes. You can't have both. So maybe readers want higher quality books, but they don't want boring, repetitive stuff that they've read a hundred times before.
Just a thought.
Cheers, Greg.
It occurred to me today that we as indies have been fighting a losing battle by trying to argue that indie books are of the same quality as trade published books. Certainly many are, but at the same time a great many aren't. Which means that the quality of an indie book on average is less than that of a trade published book. This is basic statistics, and as long as many indie authors produce poor quality work, there's nothing we can do about it. And readers will know this - let's be honest. They aren't dumb. And if they've been browsing as I do and checked out a lot of books, indie as well as trade, they will have come across some poor indie works.
Those invested in the trade publishing world have of course seized on this quality gap and used it as a club to beat us over the head with. Again, this is their bread and butter we're threatening, so there's not much we can do about that either.
And so we as indies will always be labelled with the stigma of poor quality.
But, and here's where things get turned around, the underlying reason for this difference is the presence or absence of gatekeepers. In the trade publishing world books of substandard quality simply aren't produced - or shouldn't be. But the gatekeepers have been knocking out books for other reasons than quality. And as all of us know, often the reason for their rejections has been commercial success. In short if a book didn't fit in a commerial genre or follow a particular commercial trope, it was unlikely to be picked up.
That means if you want original, fresh work, you're much more likely to find it among indie books than the trade published.
So maybe instead of trying to argue a losing cause and to claim that indie books are of the same quality on average as trade published, we should instead be arguing a winning one. That indie books are fresher, more original, more creative etc. And if those invested in trade publishing claim we produce poor quality work that they would never publish, we as those invested in the indie publishing world argue that they produce formulaic, derivative, generic and unoriginal work.
This is in debating a thing called framing the argument. Showing the true costs of choices etc. So everybody wants better health care but no one wants to pay higher taxes. You can't have both. So maybe readers want higher quality books, but they don't want boring, repetitive stuff that they've read a hundred times before.
Just a thought.
Cheers, Greg.