Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
The Indie world has indeed moved past the "gold rush" phase attracting quick-buck artists and experimenters and by now there is a commonly accepted set of best practices that writers, even newcomers, are following.
Things like commissioning professional covers being preferable to relying on stock images, to avoid cover duplication or worse, get sued for using a photo improperly distributed through stock image web sites. (It turns out to be nowhere as expensive as tradpubbers claim. A few hundred dollars rather than thousands.)
Crediting an editor and/or cover artist, as well as beta readers, is one of those suggestions and fairly common as it's considered good form to show appreciation for a good editor.
Some people still cling to the delusion that Indie books are a slush pile of wannabes and tradpub rejects when, by now, a strong plurality (if not outright majority) of Indie titles come from authors with a tradpub "pedigree", often with decades of track record, featuring reissues of older titles alongside new output. It varies with genre.
(Romance is awash with Harlequin refugees with extensive catalogs and fan bases. SF also has a pretty good crowd of established authors going Indie for new projects, but where SF&F is shining is in attracting good newcomers with alternative visions for sub-genres the establishment deprecates.)
|
So you are saying that I shouldn't believe my lying eyes when I browse the Kindle books list? Just because you keep spouting the Amazon/Indie party line, doesn't make it true. Yes, there are a lot of good indie authors, but there are many more bad indie authors. Perhaps some of the top indie authors copy the methods that the major publishers use (get a good editor, have good cover art, etc.), but claiming that most indie authors are either willing, or have the money to do all this is very much a stretch.
What's more common is an author will hire someone off one of the internet sites for a couple of hundred bucks to edit (which generally is more of a critique similar to what one might get in a workshop, plus running it through a grammar and spell checker rather than a true edit) and then spend a couple of hundred bucks for some cover art also generated by someone from an internet site. Probably better than a picture of one of your friends playing dress up, but not exactly the Brothers Hildebrandt either. How do I know? I have a friend who is an independent author and that was what people did when he published his book and that was his experience.