Why Are Indie Authors Not Taken Seriously?

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vanilla-vanilla's avatar
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Here is a very nice little Huffington Post article about why Indie Authors aren't taken seriously: www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01…

Anyway, the Huff list, in order, is below. With my snarky commentary.

1. Bad Editing. Haha. Even more than that, is the simple Sturgeon principle that 90% of everything is crap to start with. And when you have no editorial filters, you get what we now have: a fire-hose of independent publication with practically nobody rating the stuff that readers might find "better" than other stuff... for some value of "better". And we can also face the fact that not everyone who actually writes a book is competent to do so in the first place.

2. Quantity/Quality. The rush to press. Yes, in the print-on-demand world, everyone wants to get there first to get the big bucks and become famous. I blame this on Hollywood, really, and the sad lack of childhood discipline. Nobody instills reality checks in kids any more. Hey, dumbass: not everyone is going to be a movie-star or a rock-star. So stop whining if you aren't at the top of everyone's short list of talent.

3. No Gatekeepers. Hmmmph. This is really all part of the "fire-hose effect". Everything is available anytime to everyone. It's the same phenomenon we're seeing in Indie Music and Indie Everything Else. The "means of production" as Karl Marx would call it, have suddenly become almost free. For a $500 investment in a cheap laptop computer, anyone can write a book and "publish" it without making any other investment, aside from the time spent typing the damn thing. They don't even need marginally acceptable grammatical skills. ;-) And the happy fact of the modern age is that everyone already has the computer, because it's a tool that's just about as essential to "modern city life" as the telephone. (In fact, now that I think about it, anyone with one of the fancy new phones could write, upload, and offer their book for sale without even bothering to get a computer, because the phone already is a computer!)

4. Crappy Covers. Mwahahaha! Well. I'm really glad I didn't fall into that trap. Except for a few of my own really crappy so-called "art" on a couple of covers -- which you will no longer find for sale, thankfully -- I think they're all damn fine covers. The only elements on their list of "essentials" that I don't do are: professional author photos and exciting blurbs. Huh? I prefer my readers to think for themselves. I mean, if they don't buy it for the cover or the 7-page preview on Lulu.com, they aren't gonna buy it at all... And I vastly prefer my readers to imagine me as a massive five-tentacled blob from some maniacal planet 700 light years east of Alpha Centauri...

The thing they left off the list is actually, to my mind, of importance also: Indie Authors have no advertising budgets. So, duh. Nobody who has no advertising budget is taken seriously, unless they win the "lottery" and go viral on Youtube. The books that sell well are handled by really enormous corporations with dinosaur sized advertising budgets.

And... if you're still with me, friends, you might want to read this article, for a laugh: Is this the worst book ever?
:puke:
What lovely examples! That kind of B.S. definitely contributes to Indie Authors having a bad name...
© 2012 - 2024 vanilla-vanilla
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librarian-of-hell's avatar
"Hey, dumbass: not everyone is going to be a movie-star or a rock-star. So stop whining if you aren't at the top of everyone's short list of talent."
Pfft, that's what I'm trying to tell you from the beginning. Most people are crap and shouldn't live, me included. The advertising industry and fucked-up education system instill false hopes in people because it is a part of the strategy to decrease the quality of the average human being. My views are "inhuman" because they are the exact opposite of this. Yes, it starts with the kids (remember this? [link]), but you gotta ask Qui prodest? - in whose interest does this form of child abuse (yes, it is - we have an ad for a bullshit drug called "Protexin", which is supposed to enhance the effectiveness of the immune system, that uses a 3-5 year old girl to sing their jingle at the end... just think about it) take place? Commercialism as the new religion might just be a flashy mask our old friend, G-d hides behind (I hope you know why I chose that spelling ;)).

BTW, this journal entry describes pretty much why I'm decidedly not after recognition as an author while I'm still breathing. If my shit's any good, it will last, if it's not, it will go the way of the dodo and most of the teen girl bands of the last decade. Give me a place in the SAT criteria from 2123 over millions of bucks in 2012.