Quote:
Originally Posted by rhadin
No, kenny, looking at Amazon's top 100 is no guarantee that the indie book is a quality book. All it means is that it sold well. I could have sold well for a lot of reasons, for example, explicit sex scenes. The quality that Harry, I, and others look for are such things as correctly using your and you're, not having a sentence repeat itself 18 times, better dialogue than "D'uh", not writing anecdote when you mean antidote, etc. Being on Amazon's top 100 list does not address these quality issues.
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That's not a quality book. That's just basic English. There are plenty of indie authors with a command of English.
A quality book is more than the mechanics, though they do have to be correct in the finished product. It's a book which touches nerve in its readers, or addresses important philosophical, historical or political issues, or becomes a thing of beauty because of the choice of its language not the mechanics of it. Or it's a well researched, well argued non-fiction treatise or biography, the sort of stuff stonetools likes. Most quality books, in fiction anyway, don't come from the education of the author - that's what editors and proofreaders are for, and they can be hired - it comes from the imagination, vision or insight of the author, and in general that tends to be God-given, not teacher given.
To my mind focusing on your vs. you're to define a quality book misses the point altogether. Though even on those grounds I'd be interested to know just how many of the Amazon top 100 you consider grammatically inadequate. I presume there was a basis for the claim?