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Originally Posted by MGlitch
The fact that anyone seem to think that a high level of production cost results in a high quality product is laughable and moderately concerning when every market is filled with examples to the contrary. So please spare me the “I’m taking a chance on an indie author” nonsense. You take a chance on all art.
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Sure--but no matter what you say, the bottom line is, when you take a chance on "art" of any kind, whether it's paintings, sculpture, music or books, you are taking less of a chance in an arena in which there are gatekeepers. That's simply the bottom line. Were that NOT the case, trade publishing would never have vastly and rapidly outpaced self-publishing in the first place. (yes, there are arguments about a publishing company being better able to eat the costs of publishing--editing, etc.--but c'mon, "trade publishers" all started out as one-man bands in the first damn place, no better able to fork out thousands on an edit than the original author, so that argument doesn't really hold water.)
Sure, you can cruise a beachfront, boardwalk, downtown area and stop and look at every streetside artist. Hell, you could even organize a "showing" one night, with every painter, artist in other media, etc. all showing up in the area and displaying their wares. You can also invest that same time in going to a gallery opening, a museum,
or like Scottsdale, AZ, an "Art Walk" in which all the local galleries have a night in which they display their various artists. Hmmm...I wonder
which event(s) people will make more time for? Lemme think....in the case of the latter examples, all have been subjected to gatekeepers. In the former, there are zero gatekeepers and while I don't have a polling to fall back on, I think you'd find that those folks interested in art will do the latter in significantly greater numbers than the former. (Assuming that they're not coming off a lockdown, bored spitless and all that.)
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And the idea that an author would rather return money for an unspecified reason vs a review which actually gives them feedback is bonkers.
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Really? Presumably, then, you either skimmed, missed, or what, completely blew off the part of my post about that,
where I said I'd polled my customers? I've produced books for +/-5,000 of them--self-publishing authors. Now, color me biased, but
I think that's a fairly representative sampling of self-pubs. Overwhelmingly--
overwhelmingly, by a factor of 4:1, they would rather refund money than get a bad review. For that matter, a distinction--for a new book, a new release, that increases to
an 11:1 ratio. The 4:1, by the way, is for a book that already has 100+ reviews. That's how much weight they give negative reviews--how much business they think that they can lose, due to a well-written negative review. (As opposed to "I hated it" or the like.)
So, you can think I'm "bonkers" all you want, but my customer base disagrees with you--and they're pretty much all self-published authors (with a small cadre of newer publishing houses).
Hitch