Three topics on self-publishing you should read
If you’re a self-published author, I’ve been reading a lot of your blog posts lately. I’m new to this side of publishing, and so I’m trying to familiarize myself with the territory. In order to do that, I’ve been following the short URLs in tweets to read what many of you are thinking about. Here are three posts that I’ve read in the last few days.
SHOULD AMAZON CHARGE TO UPLOAD BOOKS?
Apparently, there’s been some discussion regarding Amazon actually charging authors to upload their books. I guess this would be in addition to the file delivery fee (10 cents of every book, in my case), and the royalty fee (3o percent, again, in my case).
The two posts I’ve read on this subject, started by Rob Guthrie at robonwriting.com (he has an initial post under Phreaky Friday, and then another post with responses by fellow authors) and followed up by Trish Gentry at chickletslit.wordpress.com, have both been in favor of some kind of upload charge. Guthrie gives $500 per book as an example. This would be good for serious authors, the bloggers contend, because it would do a couple of things. One, it would help to reduce the number of free or 99 cent books available on Amazon—assuming Amazon charged to upload the freebies and the discounted books— and two, it would slow down those would-be authors (who do little editing or have little writing talent) from uploading their dreck. It’s win-win for readers and authors—less trash to wade through for readers, and less trash being passed off as competition for good writers.
If you read an earlier post of mine on this site, you know I’m not in favor of giving away books for free, even in the KDP Select promotion. I don’t want my readers to get used to getting my books for free, because it does skew the perception of value. I believe in my book enough to charge for it, albeit what’s become the top-end price ($2.99) for debut authors.
I don’t feel like Amazon owes me any opportunities to upload my book for free, and I feel they have every right to take something from the sale of each book. That’s become an industry standard. I’d rather keep my expenses down as much as I can, however, so I’m not going to go out of my way to favor or encourage an upload fee. If it happens, I hope it will be the way Guthrie and Gentry describe.
STORY BEFORE PERFECTION
Another post, on a totally different subject, also caught my interest this week. It comes from Jody Hedlund at jodyhedlund.blogspot.com and is entitled Publication: Perfection Not Required.
Hedlund makes very good points here. We all want our books to be as perfect as they can be, but not at the expense of the story. The storyteller in me says, “Woohoo! Darn straight!” The editor in me goes, “Now, hold on, just a minute.” Readers don’t want grammatical errors or misspelled words, but they do want some pizzazz and literary flair. And they do want a story that doesn’t follow convention, at least not that they can tell. They want something fresh, something new, and some style along with their substance.
For me, character dialogue is one thing that should not be perfected—it’s been a long time since our speech has matched our writing style (okay, with Twitter and other social media, maybe the writing has degraded to how we speak). If the character speaks a certain way, then that character should speak that way, and do so throughout.
WATCH OUT FOR EDITORIAL REVIEWS
Last post I wanted to share was this one from Jeff Bennington, at The Writing Bomb. It’s called Amazon is Publishing Reviews? Will You be Next? Bennington brings up the point that places like Publishers Weekly can get a review of your book into the Editorial Review section of your book’s page, which comes above the Book Description. It’s awesome if it’s a great review, but not so great if it’s not, because it can push everything else we want our potential readers to see down the page, thus souring the customer’s attention completely, even if actual customer reviews are awesome.
We all know there’s a difference between what professional critics see and what the average reader sees. As argued by Hedlund above, perfection should not trump story. If that’s what the professional reviewer is hung up on, I think there’s a problem.
The scariest thing about this is, the author has no control over where the reviews show up, so beware, if you have sent your book off for review somewhere else. There’s a chance the review, for good or bad, might end up there.
Anyway, thought I’d comment on these posts with one of my own, since it would take about 100 tweets to get what I had in here out.
Shoutouts to @KirkusMacGowan, @RachelleGardner and @Kindlbookreview for tweeting or retweeting these blog posts.
