Quote:
Originally Posted by ProfCrash
I know, you can't generalize, but I sure found some really, really bad indie authors. The good news for me is that their books were free so I didn't feel bad about stopping in the middle and removing them from my Kindle.
I really need to check out the book recommendation area here...
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I start with some ground rules for myself.
Any spelling or grammatical errors that I notice in the description = don't bother downloading. I'll sometimes tolerate errors in mainstream books' descriptions--but those weren't written by the author. The blurb is the first sample of the author's writing; if s/he can't fails to make that appeal to me, I'm not going to try the book, no matter how compelling the premise.
Under 15,000 words: No more than $3.
Up to 50,000 words: up to $5.
More than 50k words: Up to $7. And mostly, only up to $5; I won't buy an unknown-to-me author for $7.
More than $7: not for leisure reading. If I find interesting nonfic that costs more, I'll consider it. (I'll buy gaming PDFs that cost more than that.)
Software-contingent DRM: Nope. No purchase. No downloading freebies. (Social DRM like watermarks in PDFs, I'm prone to stripping before converting to however I'm going to actually read them.)
For books at Smashwords, I read the HTML sample on the site. (No sample = no purchase.) If the first few pages don't interest me, I skip it. If the sample shuts off before I decide, I skip it. (WTF is with 15% samples of 9000-word short stories? What, afraid people are going to read half the story and decide they don't care how it ended?)