Quote:
Originally Posted by ProfCrash
I normally only buy indie authors who have come highly recommended by friends or posters whose opinion I greatly respect. I have to admit that 90% of what I have tried gave me a good understanding of why the author was an independent author.
I know, you can't generalize, but I sure found some really, really bad indie authors.
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Look around and you'll find a lot of equally bad books from the BPHs.
It's called Sturgeon's law: "90% of everything is crap."
No reason why indie books should be better or worse than the BPH-vetted one. Cause for every deluded wanna-be Hemingway self-published junker (that's the stereotype, right?) out there there is an equally-bad 3-chapter bait and switch rush job (the other stereotype) out there.
Ultimately, the BPHs and their Publisher's Association stooges are swimming against a tide of consumerism. Consumers are now in control and no amount of pronouncements and legal mumbo-jumbo is going to change the fact that the vast majority of buyers *know* they don't have to take it meekly. For every buyer who shrugs off price increases and irrational policies, there's easily a dozen who will grumble and take their business elsewhere; to the small and medium publishers, the genre houses who know which side their bread is buttered on, and yes, the self-published independents. And those are the honest readers. The others...
The BPH execs may chortle at their short-term profit boost in absolute revenue but it is coming at the expense of market share. For now, the overall market is growing as ebooks phase in and a lot of people are filling out their ebook libraries. This phase will not last forever. Eventually the pbook business is going to level off and start to decline. And when that happen, ebook market share is going to be the telling discriminator as to who prospers and who wanes.
In the meantime, those of us who take our business elsewhere may not individually amount to much in the BPH's eyes (a few hundred or thousand bucks each at most) but multiply it by even a few thousand or a few hundred thousand and it'll start to add up.
As the old-time Congressman said: "A million bucks here, a million bucks there, pretty soon it adds up to real money..."