Quote:
Originally Posted by DavidKitson
I think some of the attitudes presented here are rather sad. Free shouldn't mean poor quality but having recently made the work of several years available for free, it may not be appropriate for me to comment.
|
The fundamental problem, David, is that as you say yourself in your very thoughtful post (for which many thanks), very few self-published works are professionally edited, and that's the killer. Editing is the one truly invaluable service that a publisher provides. Almost nobody is capable of objectively editing their own work (and that certainly includes me, too!). It's that lack of proper editing that is unfortunately the key differentiating quality factor between most self-published authors, and books from publishing houses. I was astonished what a difference my editor made to my (non-fiction) books. I thought that I'd done a reasonable job of writing, but it was my editor who made my books into something that was marketable.