I continue to be impressed by Smashwords – it’s easy to create and put up content for sale using the system, and it seems to be working well.
The process is basically that you upload a lightly-formatted Word document into what is termed the “Meatgrinder” – a conversion program that spits out various formats of ebook: ePub (Stanza), mobi (for Kindle, etc.), PRC (Palm), RTF, text (of course) and PDF. Obviously some of these conversions can be done better by dedicated programs, but the sheer convenience of one upload is extremely attractive. Then you get an author page and a book page for each publication you put out, where you can define how much of each publication can be downloaded as a free sample, the price of the full download (or you can do it for free), add a blurb, etc. etc. All very easy and simple to manage. I now have Beneath Gray Skies up there ($3, 55% free “teaser”) and a short story, Keiko’s House (free).
If you format the work according to the well-defined, and well-explained Smashword guidelines, it can even make it onto Amazon! This is a boon for people like me who live outside the US and are therefore prevented from using Amazon’s Kindle publication service. Obviously, though, this is only a technical review that Smashwords performs, and it would be perfectly possible to put beautifully-formatted crap (referring to content) up on Smashwords, and have it approved for Amazon distribution. This is not Smashwords’s fault – they do not pretend to offer any editorial services at all – and they are not responsible for the standards of the material distributed through their services.
But it does disturb me that my writing, which I consider to be good quality (being as objective as I can), and which is considered to be quality material by others whose judgement I respect, is side by side with what I can only describe as complete rubbish. Verse (I won’t dignify it with the name of “poetry”) which is technically worse (rhyme and scansion) than schoolchild efforts, “self-help” or “inspirational” books that repeat trite truisms in a disorganized semi-literate fashion, and fiction that proudly displays the illiteracy and lack of professionalism of the writer (it’s obvious that writing “THE END” was the final stage in the production of the writing) are all too common. I don’t want to be part of that crowd. So I’m a snobbish elitist? Maybe. I prefer to call it a maintenance of standards.
Technorati Tags: ebook, ebooks, publishing, self-publishing, writing
One of the contributors on writers.net refers to this whole business (not just the pornography!) as “self-published turds”, and I have to agree with him. Of course, no-one wants to accept that as a description of their writing, but it’s hard to see just how editorial standards are to be maintained within self-publishing.
The other major genre that’s popular in the ebook field, by the way, is erotica/pornography (no-one sees the “dirty” books on your shelves when they’re in your phone). I actually don’t mind being associated with that genre. I don’t read it very much, and I don’t write it myself, but looking at some of the samples on Smashwords, it looks as though the quality is often quite high (of its type) – though presumably there is also a lot of trash there as well. A lot of famous writers have written erotica, with varying degrees of success – as long as ebooks don’t automatically get associated with the genre, I don’t mind.
The mass of self-published work, especially in ebooks, which take almost no effort to produce with a system like Smashwords, is probably actually of lower average quality than editors’ slush piles. At least the slush pile authors have had the discipline to print out some of their work and create a synopsis). Why on earth would editors ever consider the work of a self-published author for commercial publication? Of course, because of the sales of said self-published work. If an independently published author can point to sales of (say) 1,000 copies, that’s probably good enough for a commercial publisher to take a flyer on their work. But how do you persuade the public that your independently published book is not one of the thousands (literally) of “self-published turds” out there?
Answers to me, please…
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