12% of ebooks are self-published; most are rubbish, claims editor

[HomeInMyShoes]

Even without self-publishing. I would believe that ebooks are going to generate many more niche publishers and the landscape will change more often. It's always been the issue even when it was just big publishers. Whose editing and selections am I going to trust as a reader? While the author of the article has their own agenda, my question remains the same. How do I find the next book that I am going to enjoy? Only the individual reader can answer what they enjoy, whether that be poor-grammar-good-storyline or okay-storyline-with-good-grammar. There's a scale there and the scales intersect for me. Where that intersection is will probably change for me over time. As time goes on I will have more and more options for books; something in the range of 200,000 books published in the United States alone last year. How can I possibly make sense of that landscape and find a great read?

Articles like this one do nothing to help the reader. Yes, there is crap out there. We know that. Big publishing houses have published some of that crap because there are two types of books out there: books I like; and books that are crap.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by HomeInMyShoes

As time goes on I will have more and more options for books; something in the range of 200,000 books published in the United States alone last year. How can I possibly make sense of that landscape and find a great read?

One method is to use a trusted gatekeeper whose recommendations tally with your reading preferences, whether that be a publisher, a review blog, a critic, or anyone else. Such a gatekeeper can be a very valuable resource; the reason I buy Baen's monthly book bundle, sight unseen, every month, (and have done for some 15 years) is that I know that even if it contains a book by an author who's completely unknown to me, the odds are I'll enjoy it. I've discovered many authors that way that I might not otherwise have encountered.

[QuantumIguana]

Originally Posted by MikeB1972

The trouble with that is others may start to feel the same way, if no one is going to be first to read anything self-pubbed then it's back to the publishing houses as gatekeepers.

True, but I think the odds that no one will be willing to be the first to read are pretty slim.

Originally Posted by Catlady

So you're happy to let a bunch of unknown people with their own agendas be the gatekeepers, rather than the publishers whose function it is to find and produce marketable, popular, worthwhile books?

Personally, I don't trust Joe Nobody the Author's Shill to know more about good writing than the folks at Knopf.

I trust readers more than I trust publishers. It doesn't make one bit of difference to me whether a publisher thinks a book is marketable. I'm not interested in whether the publisher can sell a lot of books, I only care whether or not I like a book. Word of mouth is the best criteria I have for determining whether or not I am likely to like a book. I find a publisher signing off on a book to be a much inferior criteria. Not everyone who talks about a book is a shill for the author.

But feel free to use whatever criteria works for you.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by BeccaPrice

Every time someone talks about all the quality checks that trad pubbed books go through, I think of a Lora Leigh book that came out a few years ago - I forget the title. One of the man characters changes names partway through the book, and a crucial scene was dropped and had to be pubbed on Leigh's blog. Yeah, sure, quality checks.

That could be a botch job by the typesetters if you are talking about a pBook.

If it is an eBook, we all know how badly they can be botched sometimes by the people making the eBook. The most of BPH's send their eBooks to India to be made and they get tossed in some lousy template and they use automated software and if it comes out without errors and decent formatting, it's not done on purpose.

Simon & Shuster seem to have gotten the hang of eBooks for the most part. The biggest thing they still do wrong is they try to emulate the pBook look by embedding the same fonts as used in the pBook and the main body font just doesn't work well with eInk.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by QuantumIguana

I don't need someone to cut up my dinner for me, and I don't need a publisher to be a gatekeeper for me. It's not really all that difficult to filter out the crap for yourself. Most of the real crap fades away as soon as it is written. I can let other people be the guinea pigs, if others read it and enjoy it, it may be worth my time to take a look at it. I value word of mouth more highly than what critics say. If I feel I've been given sufficient reason to take a look, I'll look at the cover and blurb. If I'm still interested, I'll look at the sample. Self-publishing is here to stay.

The problem with self-publishing is weeding out the crap from the so-so the good from the very good stuff (and all in-between). How do we do it? Other then waiting for someone (to whom we respect his/her opinion) to come along to recommend something, it's a crap shoot and most of the time, we lose.

I don't care that I'm only paying maybe 99 cents for someone's eBook. If I find it to be rubbish, that's 99 cents wasted that could have been saved to go alond with other 99 cents to eventually allow me to buy a book I will like.

[JSWolf]

Amazon's KDP is not helping matters. All it's doing is allowing anyone with Word and Kindlegen to publish. It just causes the good authors to become lost in a sea of garbage. Also, the way we see these self-published authors get people to write good reviews regardless if they are deserved or not is also not helping. It's making the reviews worthless and this for the good authors, reviews are not helping them.

Amazon should only allow reviews from people who bought the eBook. That way, if it's to actually be reviewed, it will at least be reviewed by people who own it. That still doesn't say that the reviews will be worthwhile, but at least it stops the schmuck who doesn't give a crap about the eBook from putting in a totally worthless review or giving 1-star for some stupid reason.

[BearMountainBooks]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Amazon's KDP is not helping matters. All it's doing is allowing anyone with Word and Kindlegen to publish. It just causes the good authors to become lost in a sea of garbage. Also, the way we see these self-published authors get people to write good reviews regardless if they are deserved or not is also not helping. It's making the reviews worthless and this for the good authors, reviews are not helping them.

Amazon should only allow reviews from people who bought the eBook. That way, if it's to actually be reviewed, it will at least be reviewed by people who own it. That still doesn't say that the reviews will be worthwhile, but at least it stops the schmuck who doesn't give a crap about the eBook from putting in a totally worthless review or giving 1-star for some stupid reason.

It may interest you to know that these days some sites won't even take a PAID ad from an author unless they have X number of reviews. This makes the problem worse IMO. I ran across two sites while looking for a place to take out an ad. One of them required my book be 99 cents and have 10 reviews with an average star of...I think it was 4 stars. That part I don't remember. Most of my short stories and anthologies are 99 cents, but guess what? They are the least likely to generate reviews from either bloggers or purchasers. So my options are to lump it (hey, I can take my money elsewhere!) or go hunt down people and mug them for reviews. Some authors decide that "I need ten reviews" means, "I will get my Aunt Joan and Uncle Bill and so on" to add reviews. The other site required even more reviews.

One of the GR groups I'm on just put a new policy in place in order for a book to be nominated for group read: 100 reviews.

I look at numbers like that and just shake my head. Some authors will go out there and get 100 reviews just to "make the grade."

I don't know what the answer is to the review problem. The 'purchased' thing helps, but reviewers (blogs) rarely purchase the books they cover whether it is from a trad pub or an indie. I am happy to send a file to review blogs, but that doesn't guarantee a review at all (and it shouldn't). But "gifting" your book via Amazon doesn't work either. Some blogs won't accept that because it then looks like they bought the book when they didn't and some blogs, I hate to admit, exchange the gift book for something else instead...

[DiapDealer]

Just the other day I was tied up and force-read a $2.99 indie book against my will. It was the most awful experience of my life--just horrific, really. Ruined my favorite pastime forever. I'll never be able to read anything with these eyes ever again. Thanks, indie ebook explosion... thanks a bunch.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by BearMountainBooks

It may interest you to know that these days some sites won't even take a PAID ad from an author unless they have X number of reviews. This makes the problem worse IMO. I ran across two sites while looking for a place to take out an ad. One of them required my book be 99 cents and have 10 reviews with an average star of...I think it was 4 stars. That part I don't remember. Most of my short stories and anthologies are 99 cents, but guess what? They are the least likely to generate reviews from either bloggers or purchasers. So my options are to lump it (hey, I can take my money elsewhere!) or go hunt down people and mug them for reviews. Some authors decide that "I need ten reviews" means, "I will get my Aunt Joan and Uncle Bill and so on" to add reviews. The other site required even more reviews.

One of the GR groups I'm on just put a new policy in place in order for a book to be nominated for group read: 100 reviews.

I look at numbers like that and just shake my head. Some authors will go out there and get 100 reviews just to "make the grade."

I don't know what the answer is to the review problem. The 'purchased' thing helps, but reviewers (blogs) rarely purchase the books they cover whether it is from a trad pub or an indie. I am happy to send a file to review blogs, but that doesn't guarantee a review at all (and it shouldn't). But "gifting" your book via Amazon doesn't work either. Some blogs won't accept that because it then looks like they bought the book when they didn't and some blogs, I hate to admit, exchange the gift book for something else instead...

I have a beef with GR. GR is allowing reviews of books before they are published and lots of people are putting in stars and other crap without having read the book. It skews the ratings big time for a book that's not been read. The staff there don't give a crap about it. I've mentioned it and they don't care. They also don't care about eBook pages. They feel that pages should be what the publisher lists and that's the pBook pages which is wrong. ADE is not using pBook pages.

As for having to get a bunch of reviews before you can list your book is just wrong. That's just telling the author to get any old review weather it be real or not.

I also think if someone wants to get read, make the first book free because a lot of times, we (the consumer) is not going to pay for a totally unknown.

Also, one other thing that needs to be done well is the cover. If it's lousy, we might not even get to reading the description.

[BearMountainBooks]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I have a beef with GR. GR is allowing reviews of books before they are published and lots of people are putting in stars and other crap without having read the book. It skews the ratings big time for a book that's not been read. The staff there don't give a crap about it. I've mentioned it and they don't care. They also don't care about eBook pages. They feel that pages should be what the publisher lists and that's the pBook pages which is wrong. ADE is not using pBook pages.

As for having to get a bunch of reviews before you can list your book is just wrong. That's just telling the author to get any old review weather it be real or not.

I also think if someone wants to get read, make the first book free because a lot of times, we (the consumer) is not going to pay for a totally unknown.

Also, one other thing that needs to be done well is the cover. If it's lousy, we might not even get to reading the description.

TONS of readers are now getting books pre-release from netgalley. Indie authors can list their books with netgalley as well for a fee of 350 per book. So some of those stars/reviews are legit.

The free idea has worked for some authors. In the past, I've found it works better to just let reviewers know the books are there for the asking, but that started to backfire when I got emails from people without blogs, without any reviews on Amazon (or very, very few) and so on.

I think free can help with a first book, but it isn't a panacea. At this point, I've chosen to make my books lendable so that places like Lendleme might have a copy. That allows people to test drive. The problem with free is that too many people now download free and forget they have it. They never get to it. With lendleme, you have a timeframe. You're either going to read it or let it expire.

There are also a lot more free books so the competition to get noticed via that route is even more difficult that it used to be.

Hmm. I guess there are no easy answers.

[Josieb1]

Originally Posted by BearMountainBooks

Do you have a blog link to your reviews? Or are you on GR for your reviews?

Both. I'm on Goodreads as Josie Goodreads and I review for http://mrsconditreadsbooks.com/index.php

[Josieb1]

Originally Posted by BearMountainBooks

TONS of readers are now getting books pre-release from netgalley. Indie authors can list their books with netgalley as well for a fee of 350 per book. So some of those stars/reviews are legit.

The free idea has worked for some authors. In the past, I've found it works better to just let reviewers know the books are there for the asking, but that started to backfire when I got emails from people without blogs, without any reviews on Amazon (or very, very few) and so on.

I think free can help with a first book, but it isn't a panacea. At this point, I've chosen to make my books lendable so that places like Lendleme might have a copy. That allows people to test drive. The problem with free is that too many people now download free and forget they have it. They never get to it. With lendleme, you have a timeframe. You're either going to read it or let it expire.

There are also a lot more free books so the competition to get noticed via that route is even more difficult that it used to be.

Hmm. I guess there are no easy answers.

Some of our books come from Netgalley, we do review ARCs per release, but the majority of books are release date or post release date reviews.

[Josieb1]

I'd also like to state that just because I review a book, and I review on how a book makes me feel, NOT on grammer etc, it doesn't mean I get them all free, I pay for 90% of the books I review so I feel I'm entitled to comment on how I feel about a book.

[HarryT]

Don't you think it would be helpful to the readers of your reviews to note if a book does have poor grammar or spelling (please note: grammAr, not grammEr!)? You may not care about it personally, but it would be genuinely useful for those who do care to know if an author can't be bothered to get it right.

[Josieb1]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Don't you think it would be helpful to the readers of your reviews to note if a book does have poor grammar or spelling (please note: grammAr, not grammEr!)? You may not care about it personally, but it would be genuinely useful for those who do care to know if an author can't be bothered to get it right.

I don't actually feel qualified to comment on grammar as (you spotted) I am appallingly bad in that department and thank god daily for spell check and predictive text!

I've always stated that my reviews are based on feelings a book evokes as that's equally as important as the grammar and spelling. To me a book is a door to a wonderous world, an adventure, and for that I (and most people who read romance/love stories) can forgive imperfect grammar.