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The complaints noted in the article are valid. I won't buy books with tons of obvious mistakes in the sample, and I can be turned off by a bad cover.
But I think that the author underestimates what can be done by an indie author. Many if not most independent publishers are just one person. They don't have the money to hire a professional editor, or even an artist to design covers. They don't have the marketing resources of a big publishing house. But some of them are damned good writers.
I've downloaded a lot of books by independent authors from the Kindle store over the last year, and there are some real gems out there. I find I can separate them pretty quickly using Amazon's own rating system and the free samples that are provided. I might not be willing to do that extra work if the indies and mainstream authors were at parity, but when it's a difference between $0.99 and $14.99 the calculus changes considerably.
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