[beccaprice]

http://studiotendra.com/2013/07/12/this-ebook-is-a-lemon/

This goes along with the thread wondering whether people are publishing any old thing just to get stuff out there.

 

[Quiss]

http://studiotendra.com/2013/07/12/this-ebook-is-a-lemon/

This goes along with the thread wondering whether people are publishing any old thing just to get stuff out there.

In my gloomier moments I tend to agree with most of what this article contains.
There is a huge huge talent pool of good writers creating quality work. But I worry that the number of scammers and vultures will outnumber them to the point that the reader runs back to the "vetted" offerings of the big publishers.
We're peeing into our own sandbox by not making sure that we publish only the best we're capable of.

 

[MonkeyScribe]

We're peeing into our own sandbox by not making sure that we publish only the best we're capable of.

It's not the real writers doing this. The problem is, any jerk is free to come use it as a giant litter box and there's no way to keep them out.

 

[Ashy]

Yea, I agree, Becca. Actualy, Wayne Thomas Batson and some of his pals are doing something about this buy creating their own "Independant Label", called Spearhead Books.

http://www.spearheadbooks.com/

I personally think this is an AWESOME ideam, akin to what the music indistry has done. Couple it with the idea that Konrath was talking about (http://www.kboards.com/index.php/topic,156774.0.html) last week and I think you've really got a game changer...

 

[MegHarris]

It's not the real writers doing this. The problem is, any jerk is free to come use it as a giant litter box and there's no way to keep them out.

Well, exactly. Most of the people here are professional and turn out a first-class product. But anyone can self-publish anything at all. And to make it even more annoying, as I ranted on the other thread, I sometimes see ghastly crap selling well, which probably encourages those authors to turn out more ghastly stuff instead of learning from their errors. But there's nothing we can do about that; all we can do is produce good books and hope readers don't lump us in with the garbage.

 

[Gone To Croatan]

And to make it even more annoying, as I ranted on the other thread, I sometimes see ghastly crap selling well, which probably encourages those authors to turn out more ghastly stuff instead of learning from their errors.

If it's selling well, it's probably not ghastly crap.

Writers and readers look for different things in a story, so a book a writer considers 'ghastly crap' can still be a best-seller if it provides what readers want. Now readers no longer have to hope the gate-keepers will allow the ghastly crap they're looking for through the gate so they can read it.

 

[dalya]

My brand isn't "one of a sea of self-pub books," though. It's my name. This is why most of the authors who make it in self-pub will have a half-dozen or more books under their belt. I think it's nigh impossible for one-hit wonders to happen. Even the one-hitters fudge the details about exactly who did what to promote, too.

 

[Jim Johnson]

Writers and readers look for different things in a story, so a book a writer considers 'ghastly crap' can still be a best-seller if it provides what readers want. Now readers no longer have to hope the gate-keepers will allow the ghastly crap they're looking for through the gate so they can read it.

Yeah, I agree that 'ghastly crap' is in the eye of the beholder. I've seen book covers on the daily Book Bargain email blast that look amateurish, but they're selling. Readers are the gate-keepers now, and I think that's as it should be. Our job as writers is to provide the best content we're capable of providing. Let the market decide which are the bestsellers and which are the bottom-feeders.

 

[Hilary Thomson]

Two observations: People who read a lot and blog their reviews, and who have good taste, are going to develop a disproportionate amount of power over the indie market, because almost no one is willing to tackle the amount of work involved. Second, ebook borrowing websites are going to become a major, major deal that will dwarf what they are today.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Welcome to Webcomics circa 2003. The cream floats, the crap sinks and life moves on.

 

[Ashy]

Welcome to Webcomics circa 2003. The cream floats, the crap sinks and life moves on.

True dat! Nice parallel.

 

[MegHarris]

f it's selling well, it's probably not ghastly crap.

Yeah, I agree that 'ghastly crap' is in the eye of the beholder.

No, I'm talking books that we could probably all agree are ghastly crap. (One of them has scads of reviews complaining about the editing and poor story, and yet it continues to sell.) It's one of life's great mysteries as to how these things sell. If I figured it out, I feel like I could own the indie publishing world.

 

[heavycat]

You can only assess basic stylistic issues from a sample, not storytelling quality.

This is a false dilemma. The presumed inability to assess "storytelling quality" from a sample does not mean samples are not useful or effective. Were this true, movie trailers would not exist.

 

[Gone To Croatan]

The presumed inability to assess "storytelling quality" from a sample does not mean samples are not useful or effective. Were this true, movie trailers would not exist.

To be fair, movie trailers are notoriously inaccurate. Joe Dante, for example, used to throw a shot of an exploding helicopter into any trailer he edited which he thought was too boring, regardless of whether there was a helicopter in the movie, exploding or otherwise.

 

[heavycat]

To be fair, movie trailers are notoriously inaccurate.

Inaccurate? Often. Ineffective? Not a chance.

 

[swolf]

To be fair, movie trailers are notoriously inaccurate. Joe Dante, for example, used to throw a shot of an exploding helicopter into any trailer he edited which he thought was too boring, regardless of whether there was a helicopter in the movie, exploding or otherwise.

That's pretty funny.

It would get me to go see it. Exploding helecopters? *drool*

 

[Ruth Harris]

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

H. L. Mencken

 

[Cherise]

I always laugh when I read something about the race to the bottom, a market of lemons, etc.

These kind of things are written as though the internet doesn't exist.

The internet - billions upon billions of pages ranked by quality. The good goes to the top, the bad doesn't. Niches of infinite complexity and nuance exist and no one worries that some twelve-year-old posting their thoughts on a Tumblr is going to destroy the "quality" of the internet.

Paid content, free content, stolen content, reworked content... it is the most wonderful mixture of human creativity to exist in the history of humanity and yet... and yet people still write about their "worries" due to the "flood" of material in one tiny part of it.

+1

 

[daringnovelist]

Folks....

First, this person is late to the party -- it's a tired old fear that gets brought up as each new wave of writers/publishers/journalists stumble into the idea of self publishing and get all horrified when they realize that there is a huge pile of junk out there.  And they panic or rend their garments in grief at how everybody will drown in garbage for a while. 

And then they realize that the whole paradigm changed over a decade ago, and it doesn't matter, and they move on.

This is just an exact replay of what people said the first few years of the world wide web too.

"Oh, no!  Anybody can publish a web page, including crooks and spammers and idiots. And all those people will crowd out the useful sites and the web will become useless and abandoned!"

And guess what?

Crooks and spammers and idiots have indeed run rampant on the web. If you go by the number/proportion of crap webpages out there on the internet (and I don't just mean bad or stupid ones, but computer generated random junk) it's WAY worse than the worst fears of those who cried about how bad it was going to be.

You really seriously have no idea how bad the crap is out there on the internet, or just how phenomenally much there is of it.  You may think you know, but you don't.  It's unimaginable, like the space between atoms or planets or stars.

And yet the internet has not faded and been abandoned as useless.  It has blossomed.  The very parts which are most flooded with junk are also the parts that we use most.

Camille
(Ah, and I see that Emily has now beat me to this point -- oh well, it cannot be overly emphasized.)

 

[WHDean]

Admittedly, I skimmed. But the only problem I see in his analysis is that the biggest retailer (i.e., Amazon) does have a generous return policy, which, by his own admission, is one of the most important dynamics in the market.