What are eBooks?

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Of course you can be disappointed by a flawlessly-produced book; all I'm saying is that there's an extra "layer" of "reasons to be disappointed" in a self-published book which is absent from a traditionally-published one.

I know what you're saying. It just doesn't make sense to me. Didn't like is didn't like. There's no comfort to be taken in the sheen of a book I didn't like. And the quickest glance at a sample can usually eliminate complete incompetence on the part of the author for me.

I trust the recommendations of people whose recommendations I trust. Any other recommendations get vetted in ways that don't really take publishing methods into account. I run no additional risk that I didn't already run by not excluding the recommendations of others based on publishing method. The worst that can happen is I won't like it/finish it--same as it ever was.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Being traditionally-published still imbues status to an author.

To some people.
To others the vast majority of tradpub authors (excluding the big name Patterson/King/ etc) are (naive?) victims of predatory contracts and corporate hucksterism.

How a book gets to market says nothing about its inherent quality.
At best, being tradpubbed *today*means you are willing to sell ~100 years of copyright control for a payday loan and low royalties for a century.

Publishing has changed drastically in the last decade but most tradpub authors haven't internalized the sea change. Just look to the recent handwringing from the US's self-styled authors guild for their belated and timid indictment of what tradpub does to authors these days. The added value offered by the few good tradpubs is rarely enough to offset the contracts.

Established tradpub authors these days fall into three classes:
1-those that saw the change coming early enough to get most or all their backlist reverted and have gone mostly if not totally indie
2-those who didn't get the rights reverted and can only indiepub new works and only if their non-compete clauses don't prevent it.
3-those big enough not to care about leaving significant money on the table.

The other group of established authors (and there are a whole honking lot of them) are those that purposefully avoid tradpub.

As time goes on the next generation of big name authors will come from that last group.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Established tradpub authors these days fall into three classes:
1-those that saw the change coming early enough to get most or all their backlist reverted and have gone mostly if not totally indie
2-those who didn't get the rights reverted and can only indiepub new works and only if their non-compete clauses don't prevent it.
3-those big enough not to care about leaving significant money on the table.

You seriously don't think that there are any traditionally-published authors who are satisfied with their contracts? As I mentioned earlier in the thread, I buy a lot of SF/Fantasy books published by Baen. Most Baen authors seem to have been with them for a very long time and be happy enough with the deal they get. I see no rush of Baen authors into self-publishing, despite the fact that Baen's contracts are non-exclusive, and hence allow such sales.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by HarryT

In what way is it not a representative sample, kenny? Why would books promoted on MR not be representative of the wider market? Is there some reason to suppose that MR attracts particularly inept or illiterate authors?

I don't buy books based on whether they are a representative sample of the market.
I buy books because they're good. (I'm pretty good at that.) Or because they were recommended to me and/or they caught my interest and I thought they might be good (based on the summary, based on the reviews, and based on... the free sample, which is probably representative of any spelling or grammar errors ).

"Good books" are not a representative sample of ANY market.
So why would "good books" be a representative sample of the MobileRead self-promotions subforum, which is wide-open to ANYONE who wants you to spend money on their writing?

The self-promotions forum may well be representative of self-publishing in general, or publishing in general, either or both of which may be representative of Sturgeon's Law.
IMPHO, both are.

All I know is, MY READING is definitely not representative of Sturgeon's law.
And therefore, it is irrelevant which other groups are.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

"Good books" are not a representative sample of ANY market.
So why would "good books" be a representative sample of the MobileRead self-promotions subforum, which is wide-open to ANYONE who wants you to spend money on their writing?

Nobody has suggested that to be so.

The specific claim made by kenny is that the quality of books that get promoted here at MR is not representative of the wider self-published market. That's the statement that I find peculiar. If we take 100 self-published books that get promoted at MR, why should the average quality of those 100 books be better or worse than 100 self-published books that are promoted elsewhere?

[Catlady]

Originally Posted by HarryT

There is an important differentiating factor, to my mind:

When someone recommends a traditionally-published book to me, I can be assured that (unless it's a bad OCR scan) it will be free from errors of spelling and grammar, and is likely to have been reasonably well edited.

When someone recommends a self-published book to me, I always approach it with trepidation, knowing that in all likelihood, none of the above will be true, and that there are many people who don't care about such things.

Therein lies the difference. To many people it may not matter. To me, it does.

It matters to me, too. It's the absolute minimum I expect in a book. I can't and won't read something that's rife with errors or that's clearly written by an amateur who doesn't know the basic techniques of writing, who can't structure a sentence so that it is understandable.

When people say there are a lot of crappy traditionally published books, it seems to me they mean they don't like the content, for whatever reason. When people say there are a lot of crappy self-published books, it seems to me that they mean something else entirely: that the so-called book is ungrammatical, amateurish, and/or indecipherable.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Nobody has suggested that to be so.

The specific claim made by kenny is that the quality of books that get promoted here at MR is not representative of the wider self-published market. That's the statement that I find peculiar. If we take 100 self-published books that get promoted at MR, why should the average quality of those 100 books be better or worse than 100 self-published books that are promoted elsewhere?

Perhaps it wasn't immediately evident, but I was really following up on your previous post:

Originally Posted by HarryT

I've certainly looked at a lot of it. I look at the Amazon sample of every book that goes in the "Self-Promotion" forum here at MR, for example. The overwhelming majority contain sufficient errors of spelling, grammar and punctuation - or just plain poor production - in those sample pages, that I feel no wish to read them.

I don't necessarily agree with kennyc about the general high quality of the self-promotions forum.

I do think it is an irrelevant point. You seem to be hung up on judging self-publishing based on a random sampling of books; the fact that your assessment is (IMHO) accurate for that random sampling, does not, to me, justify the conclusions you seem to have made.
If I judged trad-pub based on a random sample of books, I would give up on them in disgust. Maybe not because of second-grade-spelling issues, but I would probably say "these people have taken leave of their senses if they think this is remotely interesting. I'd rather kill myself than read anything you write."

And considering that trad-pub is supposed to be "gatekeepers", I have seen a couple books that should never have been published. And it wasn't the author's fault that it had consistent spelling anyway.

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Which is still the case, of course. Although there certainly are good self-published books out there, the overwhelming majority are complete crap. Being traditionally-published still imbues status to an author.

Successful traditionally-published authors sometimes switch to self-publishing in order to gain more control over their work, but I'm sure that the overwhelming majority of self-published authors would like nothing more than to be offered a publishing contract by a traditional publisher.

HarryT,
Of the authors I know most would only go for a print deal from a traditional publisher.
Heck, I know one author who turned down a 7 figure contract to self-publish. She made what they had offered as an advance in less than a month. Of course, the publicity she got from turning it down probably helped.
Now I have met a few that would give their teeth and their first born to get a big 5 contract. The problem is the second group don't write well enough to even make it past the first gatekeeper.


By the way, I don't consider Baen as a traditional publisher because they are specialized.
Would you buy a box of Random House sight unseen. Though I am glad you have found a source you trust to get books.

How many self-published books have you actually tried? 1, 10, 100?
I could recommend you some very good self-pub authors. But since you are set against them, I won't waste my time.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

I don't necessarily agree with kennyc about the general high quality of the self-promotions forum.

I don't think he claimed that it was either high or low; simply that is was "not representative", whatever that means.

I do think it is an irrelevant point. You seem to be hung up on judging self-publishing based on a random sampling of books; the fact that your assessment is (IMHO) accurate for that random sampling, does not, to me, justify the conclusions you seem to have made.

I do believe it justifies the conclusion I've reached that the majority of self-published authors can't (or at least choose not to) write books that have correct grammar, spelling and punctuation, and that's a hurdle that has to be crossed before I'm even willing to look at how good a story-teller they are.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Cinisajoy

By the way, I don't consider Baen as a traditional publisher because they are specialized.

Would you not consider Tor or Harlequin to be traditional publishers for the same reason? All the "Big 5" have specialist imprints, whether it be SF, mystery, romance, or whatever.

How many self-published books have you actually tried?

A fair number, and there are certainly some very good ones out there.

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by AnemicOak

I don't read a lot of self-pubbed stuff and most of what I do read comes from recommendations and the like, but what I have read has ended up being stuff I enjoyed.

What I'm wondering from the claim that the overwhelming majority of it is crap is have you read a lot of it? I'm not saying you're wrong or anything, it just seems to me that for that claim to hold much weight you'd need to have read (or at least tried) an awful lot of self-pubbed books. I know for many all/most self-pubbed = crap/junk/etc., but when I actually talk to people I know making that claim I come to find out that they've never actually read any or only one or two titles over the years. One of their filters is to simply skip anything that's self-pubbed which is fine, most of it doesn't hit my radar either. If you have read a lot of it I'd love to hear some of the horror stories about your worst finds.

I do agree that being trad-pubbed holds a certain cachet in many eyes and probably always will. It's definitely the majority of my reading list.

Brian,
I could go on for hours but alas most of the horrible authors I have forgotten.
In my own experience and I once sampled about 100 self published books for a quick survey.
Note all had been picked up free.
Of those 100, 25 were completely unreadable as to literacy.
25 were readable but not well put together or were just part of a book.
25 were good but not to my particular taste.
The rest were fantastic.

Two books stand out in my mind as horrible.
One was a biography. Since the author made a glaring error I actually called the subject of the book. She had represented herself as a professional author to the old man.
The book was not even proofread.
The other was some blogger that was literally selling chapters.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Established tradpub authors these days fall into three classes:
1-those that saw the change coming early enough to get most or all their backlist reverted and have gone mostly if not totally indie
2-those who didn't get the rights reverted and can only indiepub new works and only if their non-compete clauses don't prevent it.
3-those big enough not to care about leaving significant money on the table.

I refute your division.

John Scalzi has been a traditionally published author for ten years. He seems happy with his publisher -- he's just signed a ten year contract with them for 13 books!

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Nobody has suggested that to be so.

The specific claim made by kenny is that the quality of books that get promoted here at MR is not representative of the wider self-published market. That's the statement that I find peculiar. If we take 100 self-published books that get promoted at MR, why should the average quality of those 100 books be better or worse than 100 self-published books that are promoted elsewhere?

I would say worse because most of the better authors don't have time to hang around small forums to try to drum up one or two sales.
From the names in the self-published forum, I would say I have seen 2 I know are good.

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Would you not consider Tor or Harlequin to be traditional publishers for the same reason? All the "Big 5" have specialist imprints, whether it be SF, mystery, romance, or whatever.



A fair number, and there are certainly some very good ones out there.

Imprints I understand.
Tor in itself no.
Harlequin and Silhouette are both strictly romance.
So again specialty.
Do they have people that read the manuscripts yes.
I think we are doing the word thing again.
When most people (specialized forums aside) say traditional, they are generally talking about only publishers that do the big hardbacks.

So who is Baen a division of?

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

I refute your division.

John Scalzi has been a traditionally published author for ten years. He seems happy with his publisher -- he's just signed a ten year contract with them for 13 books!

Perhaps he believes Scalzi is part of group #3