Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
Big Reason #1: Bad Editing
Granted. While there are indeed some horribly sloppy things that get through the mainstream presses, including some atrocious typos, books that have been past a professional editor, however briefly, won't contain a two-page run-on sentence that wasn't intended to be avant-garde or "artistic." Nor do they have blurb text like
nor internal quotes like
I think this is likely to remain the big issue for indie books, because although some, even many, are excellently well-written, they'll always be greatly outnumbered by the offerings of people who think their own data-dumps are interesting to other people.
Big Reason #2: Quantity Over Quality
The article seems unclear; this point seems to be an adjunct to "lack of editing," as in "skipping the editing makes it easy for authors to churn out lots of ebooks, none of which are particularly readable." Which it does, but I'm not seeing that as a separate reason.
One person says the indie movement won't be taken seriously until all published books are held to a basic minimum standard of literary quality--punctuation, grammar, somewhat-cohesive plot. It's not gonna happen. The internet isn't going to ever insist that content be well-written, and there's not going to be a nice sharp line between "stuff I threw together at my blog" and "my novel, published in serial form online."
Big Reason #3 – The Lack of Gatekeepers
"Having a trusted place to find credible reviews would certainly help separate the good from the terrible," the article says. Yes, it would. And those places are starting to appear. There isn't going to be a replacement for the gatekeepers that worked when "book publishing" was measured in the tens of thousands per year, not millions. And there will continue to be plenty of people willing to take a chance on unfiltered content.
Big Reason #4 – Crappy Covers
 . I love this series; I waited for YEARS for ebooks; I cringe when I recommend them to friends because the covers are SO BAD. (Where are the tentacles? Nothing about those covers even says "science fiction," much less "post-apoc scifi where humanity has split into two symbiotic subraces.")
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrew H.
This is the *primary* reason. Many indie books are badly written.
This acts as a multiplier to the primary reason: *a lot* of indie books are badly edited. If 5% of indie books were badly edited, it would just mean that you need to be a little careful. But I think the actual numbers are more like 95% are badly edited, so finding the well written books becomes a chore. Often too much of a chore.
This is a tertiary reason. Gatekeepers wouldn't be important if so many indies weren't poorly edited. If there were a basic assurance that the fundamentals of the vast majority of indie books were on a par with publisher books, the presence of a gatekeeper would have little more effect than a positive NY Times review...persuasive, perhaps, but not more. But as things stand now, the presence of the gatekeeper is insurance that the book is at least properly edited.
The three above reasons all dealt in various ways with the quality of the underlying book. This is more of a marketing issue, but since the cover is how many people judge a book, it's also fairly important, especially as a signal. After all, if it looks like your cover was slapped together, why should I assume you took any care with the writing itself?
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I agree with both of you! I am very sick of shifting through crap to find gems. I just don't have the patience, lol. What's worse is that as I've gotten older I stopped forcing myself to finish books I hated - which means I'm loosing money. I've bought some books by indie authors that were so bad I COULDN'T finish - even though I wanted to.