Quote:
Originally Posted by simonroyle
Regarding your rant against the "author" who slapped her NaNoWriMo on Amazon and stuck a price tag of $9 on it....
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She didn't, though.
She paid to have it "published" by a vanity press that nobody will ever hear of. The POD book is on Amazon (in the remote possibility that anyone might order it) but the ebook isn't. If I wanted to buy the ebook today, I'd have to know where to go, set up an account with that place, and buy the book -- the PDF, that is, because it's only available as a PDF. She could have done that herself. She could have put it on Amazon -- even with all their restrictions -- for free. Instead, she's limited herself to a tiny percentage of the pbook market (because face it, is anyone who doesn't know the author going to spend fifteen bucks to order a POD paperback of some indie book, when they could buy a couple of MM paperbacks of authors they've heard of for that price?) and her ebook might as well not exist.
That's why this whole situation annoyed me so much with vanity presses and their predatory tactics. The newspaper article (okay, it's a pretty sorry excuse for a newspaper, but it does print on dead trees) made it clear that she thinks she's a published author. Her "success" was held up as an example for others to aspire to. I don't know if her book was any good; it might well be the next Pulitzer prize winner. Nobody will ever know, because the article made clear she didn't even
try to get it published; for the reasons that appear so prominently in vanity press talking points, she went straight to pay-to-play, and what might have been an excellent book (okay, Sturgeon's Law says it wasn't, but there's a chance) will be buried forever at #943,776. The ebook will forever be an unread PDF ... she won't even be lucky enough to get pirated, because why would someone pirate a book they've never heard of when there are familiar books to be had?
And the paper is telling readers "Write a NaNoWriMo book, and you can be a Real Author by paying to have it published". I was at a naval museum a couple of days ago. In the gift shop, you could buy hats, any kind of hats you wanted. Pretending that someone is an author because they paid to have a book printed and PDF'd is like me buying an admiral's hat in that gift shop and claiming to be an admiral. Except there are people who believe it ... and those people will be further prey for the vanity presses. Further innocents who will shell out their hundreds of dollars for unproofed PDFs.
Hence my rant. Deserving or not, I hate seeing people fleeced by unscrupulous operators who are charging hundreds of dollars for something a person can do themself in an afternoon.