Should you read self-published books?

Praise

The best
self-published material I’ve read is far better than the worst traditionally published
books I’ve read. This is the criterion that lets me know that good
self-published material is “publishable”, but the writer has simply fallen
victim to the statistical unlikeliness of a publisher or agent taking a chance
on them. Or, the self-published writer has considered that books are sometimes diminished
in their greatness through the editing process offered by the traditional
publishing route (though less often than not, I’m sure.) Also, if a writer
wants a greater involvement with his or her business model, self-publishing is
a great option. Failure to traditionally publish is not the only reason writers
pursue self-publishing. More importantly: artistic quality is not the single
deciding factor on whether or not we should read indie authors, as I’ll
explain.

Self-published
authors, who have a tough time finding guidance, are a little too free from
restrictions: the freedom offered by the medium is seductive. The
Dunning-Kruger effect tells us that those who are inexperienced at a craft
likely overestimate their ability. Young writers, being unaware of a craft’s
intricacies, can underestimate the qualities that an artistic work has the
power to effect. If you don’t know the craft, you don’t know you don’t know it.
Thanks to this effect, crude (ie. unpolished) self-published material is
inevitable- though honestly in a way smaller dose than you’d expect, and I’ll
also mention why this is fine anyway.

Literary agents
and publishers do a great thing in that they provide a benchmark of required
quality before they will consider backing an author. This is generally a good
thing for readers seeking artistic merit in their reading matter, though
subjectivity of publishing’s selectivity of course comes into play. Traditional
publishing is not something worth obsessing about as a writer, because most
writers keep getting better and better even after they get published, which
means that whether or not you get published, no one can come to you and say
‘Okay, you’ve reached maximum quality: just give us this X amount of times and
you’re good to go.’ This is neither an attraction of creating nor appreciating
art. And again, there are levels of quality indies never knew they could
achieve because they were unaware those levels existed, but these levels will
reveal themselves if indies keep working and believing better quality is
achievable.

Published or
un-, no writer gets to coast for too long if they care about their craft. Every
writer that’s still alive and still writing is still learning. Unfortunately,
new indie authors tend to learn a lot more “in public” than published authors,
but any writer can observe this “no absolute quality benchmark” principle by
watching themselves improve irrespective of praise or attention. Too much praise
too soon is gratifying but sedative: if you could get away with 100% praise on
50% of your potential, why would you bother improving? If today was the first
day you put your hands on a piano, there’s no way you could become a world-renowned
concert pianist for many years. Some take less time than others perhaps, but
the real question is what would be the point in doing anything if just anyone
could do it straight away? Now, whether or not we need more art or new artists
is a question that shouldn’t bother anyone, because new great artists have a
way of proving their art is necessary by blowing you away with what they
produce after making art compulsively for years and years without anyone’s
permission or apparent need for them to do so.

I’ve recently
been reading Lionel Shriver’s novels, and from We Need to Talk About Kevin onwards,
her run is close to flawless. It took until she was 48 for anyone to really pay
attention to her. Imagine the kind of tenacity versus self-doubt back-and-forth
that has to go on for you to muddle through two
decades of obscurity? Not only that but I think they were due: she
published her first book at age 30 and I would argue there wasn’t great reason
to pay attention to her until two decades later. Only by Double Fault and A
Perfectly Good Family, Shriver’s sixth and seventh novels written over a decade
into her career, did I start to feel like I got my money’s worth. Only by Kevin,
book eight, released six years after book seven, did I feel like recommending a
novel of hers to anyone else. And even so, there’s a bum note or two in her
latest stuff! But I can’t get enough of Shriver’s writing now, whereas it was
just “not bad” before 2003.

It took Joseph
Heller until he was 50 to release Something Happened, only his second novel but
undoubtedly a work of genius and way better than Catch-22, I think. Marina
Abramovic has gained major mainstream fame only in recent years and she’s in
her late 60s. Damien Hirst (50) and Jeff Koons (60) both garnered early praise,
but I went to see their works in a modern art gallery in Oslo recently and the accumulation
of all their latest stuff is incredible, and it took me until this point in
their careers to “get it.” Comedian Stewart Lee had to take some time off from
stand-up comedy, after performing for 14 years, because his reviews were so
bad: after returning to the form, and now in his late 40s, Lee’s genius is
clear.

You can surely
supplant the above with your own examples. Making good art is a long game, and
as is said of many an overnight success, a closer look will reveal ages of hard
work.

Marina Abramovic
said that to be a young, famous artist is the killer. Obscurity is a total gift.
I only release stories that some trusted people deem decent, and there are
things that I and other indies are capable of that no one can yet say for sure.
Some find the preservation of younger mindsets across the course of a career of
great value. Some would say that people at different ages don’t know more or
less about the world than each other; they just know different things. I’m not
quite as generous, but something like that is true, so there really is value to
all the writing across a writer’s career- especially for the writer. And,
whether or not I enjoyed each of Shriver’s novels, for example, is irrespective
of how much I enjoyed charting her skill accumulation.

Indie
readers: We are lucky that we live in an age when an
author can be rejected by the publishing industry and still get their books
read. If we don’t read indies\ writers at all, what incentive do they have to
continue into territory that no one could have predicted in order to write our
favourite books that we didn’t know needed to exist? Without feedback from
readers, these books may never come. And there’s little that people dislike
nowadays more than missing out on something without even knowing what it is. As
an “indie reader”, you can be a patron and a supporter of the arts at minimal
cost to maximise the quality of artistic material injected into the culture. But
if you praise an indie author too much too soon, why would they get better? You
have a great responsibility, in all senses of “great”!

Indie
writers: If your book is getting amazing ratings,
how nice: ignore them. If people are slaughtering your books, that must be fun
for them, so you didn’t do that bad a
job, right? Once something is released, rest, digest, then look forwards.
Always be looking forwards. As Hugh Howey pointed out: your product is words,
so it’s not like your business grinds to a halt when you run out of product.
You can always keep going. Praise or no praise, if you are alive, you can and
will improve. As Will Self put it, “[A] creative life cannot be sustained by
approval any more than it can be destroyed by criticism – you learn this as you
go on.” And he got pretty damn good after the first ten years of writing
fiction.

Joy

Professional
editing can be a difficult thing for an indie to promise if they are pursuing
their dreams on a limited budget. I used to think that suspension of disbelief
was a terrifyingly fragile thing to conjure, but the truth is that we humans
are dying to see our own devices in everything. That makes it easy to enjoy a
story with spelling mistakes, weird grammar, nonsensical turns or clichés- not even
to say that I’ve even encountered that many of any of these anyway. Not only
that, but there are bonus joys that come with reading self-published content
that may well trump those of reading non-indie stuff.

The average
indie author, for example, is dying for an interview. Ever since he or she
wrote the first line of whatever book they’ve written, they were accepting
awards for it in their head. In most instances, turns out no one even wanted to
publish it. But encouragement is within reach for them and it comes from you.
And with what other authors that you love can you chat about their work? In whose
success can you in part stake claim? Most books have one guy or gal’s name on
the front, which makes us forget that they didn’t get there on their own.

As much as any
writer loves to say they told you everything they needed to tell you in the
book, I don’t know any of them that are that good. Noseying into their lives
always reveals insights and experiences. Nosey away at most self-published authors
whenever, wherever! You have an exclusive dialogue with the writer whenever you
want, and if you have experiences to share based on what you read in that
indie’s books, share them. You can guarantee the writer is interested because
they spent months writing about whatever topic it is. The book becomes a
dialogue-opener, and that’s often the point. In this case the reader is not just
reviewing a book, they are joining a community.

I reckon I have
about ten fans-slash-new-best-friends. And the great thing is that since
there’s only that many, I have enough time to interact with all of them and
chat endlessly about the ideas my stories sparked off. It’s lovely then that I
have far from achieved the critical mass of fame at which point a fan base outweighs
its object’s free time, which alongside the merits of success, must surely
build guilt and excess busyness. Most things in life have positive or negative
counterparts (this aphorism is its own counterpart, in that it is both “huh”-inspiring
but a bit too vague for any practical use.)

There are some
books that are so unanimously loved that I’m incapable of creating an opinion
or personal reflection. Or worse yet, before I’ve opened the thing, I want to
tear it to shreds. This is a common phenomenon, but maybe it is part of a
worldwide organic regulation system that limits fan-base sizes! It’s hard not
to feel millions of eyes reading the same book with me, and am I really so unadventurous/
important that I needed loads of people to tell me a book was great before I
picked it up? In many cases, such a following is far from an indication of
quality!

There is not
only the joy of reading a story but the “utilitarian outcome” of searching for
and finding quality material. This outcome is diminished when the material is
spoon-fed to you through bestseller lists and those “Top 100 Novels” things
packed with books you put off reading because seeing their names so often has
caused them to lose all meaning entirely. Self-published material offers a new
method of reading broadly.

When we consider
these unique ancillary joys and their contribution to the experience of a
self-published book, beyond the joy of reading the book itself, they may well
trump the experience that a bestseller/auteur’s work can offer. They were
again:

- The ability to stake claim in
part in what later success and improvement indie authors inevitably find as a
result of your involvement in their career

- The ability to interact with indie
authors and gain a deep insight into their work, an opportunity unique to authors
with small fan-bases

- The freedom to form an opinion
of an indie author’s work, irrespective of excessive praise/critique noise

- The utilitarian joys of finding
an indie author whose work you like, the best of which can undoubtedly compete
with bestsellers and auteurs

- General chat and hanging out
with a community of new cool friends you hadn’t yet met.

The last one is especially
true if you share my opinion that alive things are more important than the art
we discharge and our face-to-face (or screen-to-screen) impact eclipses anything
we could create. A book might change your life; so might a cat’s hug. Hanging
out and chatting and interacting with the world is pretty damn important, and encouraging
an indie author is one of the most valuable things you can do as a reader.

Generally,
though not always, it takes a bigger number of works into a self-published
writer’s oeuvre before they get up to speed in terms of style and original
voice. By all means take part in getting them there in an intimate and
connected way, such that the gift of their art is a thing you helped to create.