I'll write more on this later, but for now will have to leave it at that.
As I'd hoped when I wrote my first essays on the self-publishing fad, it finally seems to be fading. Not the number of self-published books...that's worse than ever. But even some of the people who had been doing well at the rigged game are now finding that their crap no longer sells--the reading public has realized that it just stinks.
For now, I take a short break until tomorrow. I have work to do.
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| The intentionally awful "novel" written to expose PUBLISHAMERICA. Now works far worse than this are published by the hundreds every few hours via Amazon and Smashwords, Kobo and Apple, etc. I wish someone could come up with a way to "expose" the flood of self-published garbage...but it's just too obvious to ridicule. |
Unless you are a whiz at self-promotion, there is no financial reason to self publish.
ReplyDeleteI suppose you could make money, if you want to sell books from the back of the trunk of your car 40 hours a week, but you already have a full time job.
I make the comparison of the successful self-published gurus and successful Amway salesmen. In the case of most of those self-published "success stories", the writing is uniformly awful. (I could name these assholes, but everyone already knows who they are.) These fellows are quite good at self-promotion, but lousy at creating even competent fiction. I heard one crowing recently about how he'd saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties because he'd self-published. The thing is, he "saved" nothing, because no publisher would have accepted his trash for publication.
ReplyDeleteHave some of these jokers done well in self-publishing? Of course they have. Have they done literature any favors? Hell, no.
This is the reason I stopped buying self-published novels. To a one of them, all that I bought for my Kindle were utter crap. Unreadable trash. I got rooked and will never again buy a self-published novel.
I do, however, occasionally stumble upon decent self-published short fiction written by established authors. I'll continue to check out that kind of material.
I don't remember if I ever told you this, but I once read a novel by a self-published author who put an exclamation point at the end of every other sentence.
ReplyDeleteIt was laughable.
He had the potential to be a good writer, but he needed to work on it more. I guess, he could have written a competent book with the help of an editor.
The sheer numbers of self-published books means that there are definitely some good books in mix. The Law of Averages dictates that this will be so.
ReplyDeleteIn some cases it could be something as simple as an editor making the book acceptable.