I was intrigued by Amazon’s generosity towards the self-publishing market. They’ll put my little self-published book together for me? For free? They’ll sell it for me and take just 35% of the sale price?
In the time it takes to chew a stick of gum, I’d ordered Kindle Fire and was ready to roll. I downloaded a lot of free books and some low-priced ones. Just to be fair to the paper people, I ordered a couple of “real” books that my real estate client might like.
What a disappointment!
Spelling, grammar, punctuation, syntax, sentence structure, paragraphing, dialog, description—any consideration for standards of good writing in these areas turned up missing. In their place, I found childish writing with incomplete thoughts and poor execution. Even public domain books were rife with errors apparently caused by sloppy or nonexistent proofreading of OCR (optical character recognition) text. Seems that the profit margin on these books is so low it doesn’t make sense to pay for quality. A decent book title is enough.
Was I the only one to be gnashing my teeth over the lack of any semblance of good writing in self-published books?
Hardly.
The E-Business Commerce Times put it this way: “Spammers have now invaded new digital territory: self-published Kindle e-books. Legitimate authors now have to compete with virtual truckloads of literary garbage —‘books’ …whose sole purpose is to irritate the many while exploiting a few.”
Besides books that are hopelessly marred by poor grammar and bad spelling, casting a shadow over self-publishing, there is also a parade of books that are technically, but not legally, plagiaristic. Known as Private Label Rights (PLR), the content of these books consists of text from self-published books. The author’s name is changed, the books get a new title and price, and voila! A new e-book is born. It’s legal because the author agreed for the book to be sold on the Web.
You can find businesses eager to provide PLR books for you. I found one website offering eighteen PLR books for just $9.97. The books have great titles, such as “How to Boost Your Metabolism” or “Quick Start to Online Profits.” You can rewrite, redesign, reformat, and rename these books with you as the author. Or almost anything else you wish to do with them. Legalized plagiarism.
One cure to the proliferation of poorly written books has been suggested: require an ISBN for every book published by Amazon. That wouldn’t address the quality issue directly, but it would clearly identify the source of the book and cost enough to slow down or stop the Spammers.
Another solution is for authors and producers who care about quality to combine their resources to develop a method for evaluating e-books that are flooding the market. I’m still thinking about that, although in a very small way. I came up with a new publishing name, Forthright Publishing, for my books and anybody else’s that I find meet basic standards in writing and editing skills. Books that pass muster would be posted on request—free. I wouldn’t make any money, but it wouldn’t cost me much, either. Others could do the same.
Meanwhile it will be interesting to watch what happens in the self-publishing world while publishing anything at all becomes easier and making a book that is well-written and -designed, and sells for a good price becomes a greater challenge.
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You are thinking about this in a Very small way. There needs to be a class action suit. The new SOPA bill may address this issue
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act
Wikipedia will be unavailable Jan 18 to oppose this act. It is a huge problem and Wiki should not be involved opposing it. Creativity stolen is creativity stifled.
Self-publishers who care about the quality of their books work very hard at not looking self-published. That means that books of dreadful quality that are obviously self-published have come to define self-publishing.
Readers who have been reading ebooks for awhile, including the free and cheap ones, know enough to download a sample to check for quality. They can view the same sample online. Readers also mention both the quality of the writing and the quality of the formatting in their reviews. Thousands of ebook review sites and blogs are helping readers find independently published books that are well done.
The upside of the new open marketplace is that we are hearing stories that we would never have heard when “legitimate” publishers determined what got published. Yes, there is a tsunami of crap, but there are gems in that pile, and people are getting better at finding them and telling others about them.
The world is full of scams and shoddy goods. Somehow we learn to navigate our way through the minefield. We will with self-published books too.
Catherine M Wilson
Shield Maiden Press
Well, it’s the same that happens in the blogging world full of low level blogs just put up in the search for easy money. Those spammers and quick money searchers move where there is food for them, just like locusts and with the same effect. I still remember when I bought an ebook on improving memory and it was just a copy of a public domain book of William Walter Atkinson.
Also let’s not forget that many of those have websites in countries where internet legislation is lacking and where you can live well with a couple of hundred dollars per month so it is always worth it.
No easy solution, unfortunately.
I spend a great deal of time (years) researching, writing, re-writing, editing, hiring a developmental editor and re-writing it again before I had a finished product. I took great pains to hire a professional photographer for the cover of the book and get permission to use the photos I used for the back of the book. Quotes from the Bible were give with permission by the American Bible Society. I established my business name and logo (only to have someone a year later steal the name by putting a hyphen between flamingo and publications, using the same website name for her publication). I see people give their work away on http://www.smashwords.com and I charge for my book. Do I really think people will buy my book when they can get all the books they want for free? People have come to expect everything for free and authors indulge them. This is a mistake. I can’t sell my print books because people can go to the library and get it for free or go to a used book store and get it for next to nothing. There is no profit in writing unless you are a James Patterson or Stephen King.
The problem with self-publishing is that there is no legitimate screen or review process to distinguish the good from the awful. I have bought books by mistake that had good titles and good covers but inside were junk. For one book I bought, the lines of text were tripple spaced, evidently to give the book more pages.
It seems like some kind of a review board might be set up to eliminate the worst of the worst. Or, in a more positive way, to commend books with decent content and structure.
Another option would be for Amazon or any other book-selling service to apply a set of standards, minimal perhaps but still standards, to all books before they are available to the public.
Of course, with an appropriate name for the “publisher,” nobody can tell if a book is self-published or not just by looking at it. A cure for that might be to form to produce books for pay. That group would lend its seal of approval and refuse to accept those who do not meet basic standards. The problem is that another group that has no standards will walk away with the profits from selling poor-quality books at low prices.
The final solution is branding. Develop a self-publishing moniker and logo and apply it only to books you handle that meet your standard. Advertise and promote your brand as sign of quality. Eventually, “good” books will rise to the top.