Pissing In The Pool (Or Why Readers Hate Indie Writers)
I recently took a minor part in a discussion on Amazon’s Kindle forums. This started because some of the people on there were looking for a way to filter out self-published authors (like me) and only see ‘proper’ authors. This would obviously not be something I’d be keen on.
But the thread I was drawn into was started by someone – another indie writer – complaining about this. And these were some of his complaints:
I’ve also read thousands of pieces of literature, mainly trad. published, and I’ve seen all types of mistakes in the writing — spelling errors, bad sentences, bad grammer, plots that didn’t add up . . . all and all, for me personally, I’m not a nazi, it’s no big deal, it’s just a story . . . when you see a play or a concert or some type of live show and the performer is a little out of key or makes a mistake, is it that big of a deal? So why are people so hard on indie writers?
This is an attitude I see all the time. There are two parallel lines of thought among self-published authors, both of which are pernicious but which when combined come close to being actively evil.
The first is “Those evil traditional publishers are just trying to keep us indie authors down, with their pesky rules about ‘writing good English’ and ‘not plagiarising’ and ‘bothering to be vaguely coherent’. Real talent like mine doesn’t need those things.”
That is then coupled with an attitude that can be found on the Kindle author boards, which says that anyone giving a self-published author a bad review is ‘jealous’ – or in extreme cases that bad reviews are obviously the work of the evil publishers, trying to knock the competition, and that the last thing you should do is pay attention to those nit-pickers who point out problems with your work.
Let me put this as simply as I can:
If you are charging for your work, you have an obligation to be professional.
This is particularly true in the case of publishing. When you put your book up for sale on Amazon, you’re in direct competition with every other work of literature ever published, near enough. That means *you have to be that good*.
You don’t have to have written the single best book ever written, of course. But there has to be at least one person in the world, who doesn’t know you, for whom your book is the single best way they could spend their money and reading time.
Can you make a convincing case that there is *someone* out there who will get more out of reading your book than out of reading Hamlet, or Ulysses, or the Feynman Lectures In Physics, or Huckleberry Finn, or Catch-22, or Orwell’s collected essays, or Thank You Jeeves, or any of a million other books? Is there someone out there who, if presented with all those books, you could tell with a straight face “you’ll like mine more”?
There don’t have to be many of them. The numbers could be in single figures. But if those people don’t exist, then *YOU HAVE NO BUSINESS PUTTING YOUR WORK OUT FOR SALE*. You are, fundamentally, trying to perpetrate a fraud on your readers. You are telling them “this is the book you should read next” when you know full well that they shouldn’t read it at all.
I don’t make any great claims for my own work’s quality, but it does meet that standard. I know it does, because people I don’t know, with no reason to care either way, have said to me “I enjoyed your stories, I hope you write some more” or “I liked the Beach Boys book, when’s volume two coming out?” or “I bought the Beach Boys book and liked it, you should all buy the Monkees book” or “I loved that essay, if you collect it in a book, I’ll buy it”. I wouldn’t be ashamed of telling any of those people to buy any of my other books in the same categories.
But the reason for this is that I *make the effort*. I get several people, with different levels of knowledge and different skill-sets, to read what I’ve written and check that it makes sense. I spend many hours proof-reading. I get good covers. I do my utmost to ensure that not a single error of fact or of language slips through. Errors nonetheless occur, of course – I am human, after all – but not one person has ever emailed me with a problem, even though I include an email address for errata in the books.
That’s not me boasting. That’s the *minimum* standard which you should be reaching before you put a book out for sale.
If you put out a book that is not the absolute best work you can do at the time, you are causing harm in three ways:
You’re harming the people buying your book under false pretences. Doing this to them is a species of fraud.
You’re harming yourself. Your reputation will suffer, as will your chances of ever having a career in writing (which presumably you would want).
And you are harming those authors like me, or my uncle, or Simon Bucher-Jones or Andrew Rilstone or Lawrence Burton or Chris Browning or hundreds of others who actually *do* put the basic effort in to make our work competent. Every time someone buys something like this or this, they are going to be that much more likely to want to avoid any further self-published authors for fear it’ll be the same.
And that goes double if you get involved in ‘review swaps’, artificially inflating the review scores of terrible books. And triple if you spam readers’ forums about your books. And quadruple if, on those readers’ forums, you start talking about how “we self-publishers aren’t bound by your Nazi rules of grammar, it’s all about free expression.”
Every time you do this, you’re not only sabotaging yourself, but you’re hurting everyone else, too.
There are a lot of very, very good self-published authors out there, with good reasons for publishing their own work rather than going through publication houses. But as long as we tolerate – and even encourage – incompetence, illiteracy and unprofessionalism in the name of solidarity, or sticking it to ‘the man’, or even just being kind to someone who means well and tries hard, sensible readers are going to lump everyone in together and avoid all of us.
If you read self-published books, please leave honest and accurate reviews, both good and bad, on the books you’ve read, so people know what they’re getting. The good reviews help books with no marketing budget, and the bad reviews help sink the rubbish more quickly.
If you *write* self-published books, please take the same care you’d take in your day job (or greater), and treat readers as potential customers rather than antagonists.
If you hang around on self-publishing forums, please don’t encourage obvious incompetence and laziness. Please do provide constructive – but thorough – criticism for those who need it.
If we all do this, then with a little luck the people writing drivel will realise that Amazon isn’t an infinite money-tree, and readers can get back to reading books they want to read, and writers to writing them, without having to worry about who’s self-published and who isn’t.
Linkblogging For 29/05/11 (warning, contains rant including very offensive swear word)
Firstly, and most importantly… to those of you who wonder why I have such an active hatred for organisations like Racist UKIP, this is why. The Home Office is planning to deport a quadriplegic, partially-sighted five-year-old girl with cerebral palsy, heart problems and epilepsy to Algeria – where she will die – rather than letting her stay with the uncle and aunt who want to adopt her and who are the only family she’s ever known.
This is happening because organisations like Racist UKIP have so poisoned debate in this country that it’s become commonly accepted that we ‘need to get tough on immigration’ and ‘we have no control over our borders’. Well, congratulations. Because of you, a scared little girl is going to be bundled onto a plane on her own, and sent to live with strangers for a very short time before she dies. I hope you’re proud of yourselves, you unutterably evil cunts. Still, I suppose you don’t mind – she does have brown skin, after all.
(I don’t normally use language like that, but in this case it’s deserved and more so.)
There *is* a debate to be had on immigration, but it should start from the idea that people should be allowed free movement, and should be centred on helping immigrants integrate and helping communities cope with the changes that result, not on keeping people out of a country whose people aren’t even reproducing at replacement rate and which *needs* immigrants to avoid a total demographic collapse. We should be spending money on ESOL lessons and community-building projects, not on deporting five-year-olds.
If you’re as sickened by this as I am, please, please sign the petition. It’ll have very little effect, I’m sure, but there’s little else that can be done, and if nothing else it will show that you aren’t giving your consent for this kind of sickening behaviour.
Anyway, onto much less angering/upsetting topics:
I agree entirely with Jennie’s assessment of last night’s utter travesty of a ‘Doctor Who’ episode. I’ll try not to ‘spoil’ it, insofar as something so wretched *can* be ‘spoiled’, but the Doctor’s behaviour at the climax was utterly, abhorrently, *EVIL* and totally unjustifiable given the rest of the episode. I’ve said before that while Moffat is great at plot and OK at dialogue, his major failing as a writer is his utter amorality. This proved it (and it was a ‘story arc’ plot point, so Moffat rather than Graham is to blame).
Debi reviews an exhibition about the world’s largest dinosaurs. There’s also a guest post on this at SV-POW.
Measure of Doubt on Bayes’ theorem and ‘thinking in grayscale‘.
How to make money in microseconds
I knew going to work was bad for you…
Computer scientists build cellular automaton supercollider
Alex Wilcock on The Avengers – Game
The Aporetic on the alleged efficiencies of the private sector
And the Torygraph, of all papers, say Chris Huhne has achieved more in a year than most top politicians achieve in a lifetime.
University Challenged
‘Newspapers’ like the Daily Mail and the Express get savaged on a routine basis by bloggers, but almost as bad, because of its perceived respectability, is that once-great newspaper The Times. Over the decades since it was bought up by Rupert Murdoch, a paper that is synonymous with quality the world over has become merely a ventriloquist’s dummy, mouthing whatever its owner thinks will best benefit his business.
In particular, it joins in the regular attacks on the BBC, an institution that ‘media’ figures such as Murdoch can’t stand, and it does it more cleverly than the tabloids, and as such more dangerously. Take this article as an example. There are no actual factual errors in it (with one possible exception to be mentioned later) but the impression given, which can be gauged from the readers’ comments at the bottom, is a wholly misleading one.
For those of you who don’t know, University Challenge is a TV program which has been going for over forty-five years (with a break of a few years in the late 80s/early 90s) in which teams of four people, representing universities or colleges (due to an historical quirk Oxford and Cambridge universities are allowed to submit a team for each of their colleges, of which there are several) answer general knowledge questions (older USians may remember a show called College Bowl, with the same format). These questions tend to be on the hard side – I appeared on the show myself, and remember questions on orbital mechanics coming up, as an example – although the students appearing aren’t *quite* as knowledgeable as they appear (long stretches where no-one answers a question are routinely cut from the show as transmitted). In fact it’s probably the most difficult quiz show on TV, by some considerable margin.
I don’t have a TV myself, so can’t vouch for the next bit, but apparently this year one of the teams from Oxford university – the team that went on to win the competition, in fact – had someone who knew rather a lot of the answers on it. As we are, for the first time in history, living in a time with no wars, no imminent environmental danger, no economic crises and no draconian laws being passed, the fact that someone at one of the two or three best universities in the world, who was appearing on a quiz show for people who know quite a lot of things, knew some of the answers was the biggest news story of the last few weeks. Even more amazingly, this student was a woman in her twenties and, by all accounts, looked like a rather pleasant-looking young woman. As this is clearly the most momentous event in human history (second only to the story that someone who was once on a ‘reality TV’ show has cancer, anyway) it has received a lot of coverage in the newspapers.
(It may even have received so much coverage that the documentary first broadcast as Forty Years of University Challenge and later as Forty-Five Years Of University Challenge may be rebroadcast under some pretext as they occasionally do, in which case those of you in the UK who want to know what I look like can watch out for the bearded one impersonating David Aaronovitch in the reconstructions).
However, after the last episode was broadcast, even more momentous news broke. It turned out that one of the people on the team had actually left the university between the start of the contest and the end! Calumnity! Capostrophe! Catachresisclysm! Surely this was the crime of the millennium? The BBC, who broadcast (but, crucially for what follows, do not produce) the show leapt into action, and ‘stripped them of their title’ (whatever that means in this context, given that you win nothing but the satisfaction of winning on this show).
But now, in a daring act of investigative journalism, the Times has exclusively revealed that this has happened in the past – that some teams have had members leave the university in the middle of the series. Now, as it happens, several of the cases involve people who went on to a different university, which as Jennie points out in a slightly different context here is perfectly within the rules, but at least one is a genuine case of the rules being broken.
Now, look at the comments again, and what do you see? A lot of people saying what the BBC should do, or talking about how the BBC should have done something or other differently. They’re doing this because they got the clear impression that the BBC had something to do with the making of the programme.
They didn’t.
University Challenge is, and always has been, made by Granada TV, a commercial broadcaster, part of the ITV network. It was originally an ITV show, and Bamber Gascoigne, quoted in the article, presented it on ITV for 25 years. The BBC don’t make the programme, and never have. They broadcast it, after it’s produced by the independent company. Now, in the article, they do state that Granada produce the programme, but they mention it once, in passing. On the other hand, the BBC are mentioned four times, in the context of ‘responsibility’ and ‘decisions’, including being the last two words in the article.
So a quiz team tell Granada they’re eligible when they’re not. Then Granada don’t bother to check this. But it’s the BBC, who merely broadcast the finished product, who are at fault – to the extent that anyone’s ‘at fault’ given that no-one would have cared in the slightest (as can be proved by the other examples in the Times article) had a *different* member of the team not been extremely good.
I look forward to next week’s story about how the BBC cause cancer.
(Incidentally, I was planning to write another post today, as well, about Watchmen, but this took *four hours* to post, thanks to TalkTalk’s incredibly crappy ‘broadband’ ‘service’. See Andrew Rilstone’s most recent post – does anyone know of a *good* broadband/phone provider (ie not BT (and see today’s Daily Mash for more on them), TalkTalk or Virgin) in the UK? Don’t expect much from me until TalkTalk manage to get a) my ‘phone line and b) their DNS servers sorted out…)
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