If you go by the media, by the bloggers, by the Twitter and Facebook posts, you get three basic images of what being an Indie writer is in this newfangled paradigm of self-publishing.

We are pitiful creatures who lack the skills to write a proper book with sentences and commas and a semi-colon jammed in here or there, like right now; or we are unscrupulous scammers with no regard for convention or decorum and don’t care if we fake reviews, ratings or even our entire bloody book. Or we are a combination of the two.

This internet thing is great. But the one problem is that everyone jumps on an idea, right or wrong, true or false, and runs with it like Red Grange. That’s a pop culture reference for you old folks in the audience, by the way. One little rumor becomes a hard fact through the ether, which makes your grandma’s quilting group look like the NSA when it comes to gossip.

There is quite definitely truth to all of those views on what indie writers are. There are a lot of writers (and I readily admit that I used to belong to this category) who don’t bother to edit their work properly, either because they have an ego that says they don’t need to, a wallet that says they can’t afford to, or they simply don’t realize they should. And there are quite definitely a number of writers out there, indie AND traditionally-published ones, who have no qualms about buttressing their place in the market with sock puppet reviews and fake less-than-exemplary reviews on those they see as competing authors.

You get that everywhere, in any profession, and in any situation. There are always those who don’t know, don’t care or simply want to take the easy way out. That’s a simple fact of life you can’t avoid. You can find scum on the top and the bottom of a pond. And yet often times that pond needs that scum in order to complete the circle of life for the inhabitants of said pond. This is another thing people don’t always consider.

I’ve always had a theory that since human beings as a race really don’t have anything above them in the food chain anymore, we see evil in the world. A severe lack of velociraptors in alley ways has given forth to the criminal element, the crazy element, and the megalomaniacal element. Because tigers don’t regularly chomp us, we instead have crooks, thieves, serial killers and despotic rulers to keep us on our toes. This extends to the mundane world of publishing as well. Every time some new fear-mongering rumor comes along to scare the bejeebus out of new writers, when it is ultimately shot down, it hopefully makes us a little stronger. If we know that there are the ignorant who don’t edit, the bozos who buy reviews, the morons who sock puppet their way up the charts, and the deceitful that bear false witness against other books, we writers can use that to improve the way we do business.

I can’t really lump sock puppets with serial killers, of course. Though a serial killer who uses a sock puppet would be Buffalo Bill-scary in the right light. The laws specifically proscribing buying reviews or sock-puppetry (bad editing, unfortunately, is only a crime of taste) are either hard to enforce, expensive to enforce, not meeting the standards for the 21st century, or are simply non-existent for indie writers. Some people have no problem with this new status quo at all. Some people have ethics and craftsmanship and won’t go that route. I suppose in the end it is a personal choice, but one that if exposed, will tell your readers more about you than you may care for them to know.