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Old 05-21-2018, 12:21 PM   #7
Mivo
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Posts: 556
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Join Date: Jul 2013
Location: Germany
Device: In use: Pocketbook InkPad 3, Kobo Glo, iPad Air 2
I'm generally skeptical of the "Everyone is an author!" self-publishing wave, and my experience with unedited, self-published fiction has not been encouraging. The result is that I am unlikely to buy self-published works unless they are reissues from traditionally published writers.

To answer the question: I don't feel it's my place to tell an author whether or not they should put their unedited book into the wild. I wouldn't want to spend money or time on a piece of fiction that hasn't gone through a proper editing process, and I feel that it turns people like me off self-published works, but it's their book and they can do with it what they want.

If the unedited book is non-fiction and covers a niche subject that I'm interested in, I would be more willing to overlook the lack of proper editing, though if non-fiction is published by a reputable publisher, it adds to the credibility of the material (in other words, accuracy of information is more important to me than style and form, in this case).

As for translations: I think that the quality of the translation depends on whether the translator is a good writer herself. Literal translations are rarely impressive. I don't read much translated fiction anymore, but looking back, I distinctly recall two German translations that I felt were noticeably better and more memorable than the originals: the 1960s translation of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings (the later translation from the late 1980s or 1990s was inferior), and at least the early books in Goodkind's Sword of Truth series.
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