# Traditional Publishing Vs. the Indie Revolution



## David Gordon Burke (Jan 28, 2014)

How many times have we heard that the Indie world - Amazon, Smashwords etc. is suffering a glut of really bad literature due to the ease with which and Tom, Dick, Harry and Harriet can upload their work for the whole world to buy?  

There may be a lot of truth to that claim.  

Then again, there is a ton of bad prose within the traditional publishing world as well.  And to boot, writers who have established themselves via some million dollar bestseller can bank on their names to publish less-than-great sequels that are bound to sell based on the popularity of their BRAND.

The traditional publishing world has had eons to perfect their 'commercialization' of the written word.  Quality is NEVER the bottom line where a multi-million dollar publishing house is concerned.  SALES.  PROFITS.  SHAREHOLDERS.  These are the buzzwords that determine who gets published and who doesn't.

What is this commercialization?  Take the average 'classic' title from bygone eras.  The Three Musketeers, Kidnapped, Frankenstien, Slaughterhouse-Five, The Catcher in the Rye, White Fang, The Call of the Wild, Old Yeller, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Phantom of the Opera, Around the World in Eighty Days, King Solomon's Mines, Gone with the Wind, Pride and Prejudice, The Invisible Man, Lord of the Rings, The Time Machine... and so many more.  While some of them MIGHT conform to a few of TODAY'S de rigueur Literary obligations - 'start with action' 'start with dialogue' 'start with a snappy sentence' etc. and do everything short of offering up sexual favors to keep the reader interested, MOST of them just told a good story.  And in a lot of cases, the reader had to work for it.  It didn't come for free.  

Metaphorically, if you have lived a life of Meat, potatoes and veggies (classic lit) and then someone takes you out for your first bite of McDonalds (Modern Pop Pulp lit) you are going to think it's absolutely delicious.  How many Big Macs are you going to eat before you start yearning for a little home cooking?  

It's like Hollywood vs. foreign films.  

So, how many really good books have you read lately that were put on the market by an Indie writer?  

As a point of interest, I have completely forsaken ALL popular writers.  Today I read exclusively books by INDIE writers and middle of the road guys that would probably be published in Trade Paperback form.  

David Gordon Burke


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## dale (Jan 28, 2014)

the problem with the self-publishing world is that it has zero standards (except for the writer's). this leads to a lot of people who write like
a retarded 6th grader, but think they're the next john steinbeck, flooding the amazon market with garbage. i'm sure there are many great self-published
writers out there. but the sludge is so immense to wade through to find them, it becomes discouraging to even try.


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## Morkonan (Jan 28, 2014)

David Gordon Burke said:


> ...So, how many really good books have you read lately that were put on the market by an Indie writer?



None.

Well, there is one exception - I read part of a paperback that had first been published indie-style, through a vanity press. It wasn't worth finishing.

These days, I pay a lot of attention to the publisher/imprint. I have had a series of bad reading experiences with a couple of imprints and I examine anything published by them with extreme diligence. It used to be that I wouldn't even glance at the inside of a book if I was deciding whether or not to purchase it. These days, I read several paragraphs on a variety of pages. I check for PoV, Tense and other mechanical gimmicks. I then look at some snippets of dialogue in order to see if they're well written or not. 

Using such an exhaustive vetting procedure has caused me to decline even books by well-established and popular authors.

I'm going to have to start taking some risks on up-and-coming authors, though. It's getting more difficult to encounter quality reading experiences, these days. (Anecdotally, of course. I'm sure there are some out there.)


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## Tatham (Jan 29, 2014)

Well said, David. I'm bobbing there on Amazon at the moment, around books that exhibit little to no talent at all, some of which I have started reading but never finished; I was deceived by an interesting synopsis but sadly the book itself never followed through. I've learned my lesson. Sadly, this is the majority on there. But there are some books on there, diamonds in the rough, that really do have talent. It's just a shame that they're never highlighted so very well when deserved. I've only just published mine on Amazon and I'm eager to find out what sort of category I fit under. Indie publishing has many perks, but traditional publishing is so bloody hard to accomplish nowadays. I'll keep trying but for now an eBook will have to do.


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## Sam (Jan 29, 2014)

Morkonan said:


> None.



I've read at least a dozen in the last year.


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## Staff Deployment (Jan 29, 2014)

Morkonan said:


> such an exhaustive vetting procedure





Morkonan said:


> more difficult to encounter quality reading experiences



*I detect a statistical correlation here*


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## David Gordon Burke (Jan 29, 2014)

*Here's three that I read recently. I'd stack them up against ANYTHING coming out of the major publishing houses today. They are THREE that I know were first published indie style. No idea if they have been picked up yet.

The Chupacabra: A Borderline Crazy Tale of Coyotes, Cash & Cartels 
by Stephen Randel

They Rode Good Horses
D.B. Jackson
Unbroke Horses
D.B. Jackson*

Right now I am reading something called 'Chasing Profecy' by James Moser. This is a 'review' exchange. He is reading mine, I'm reading his. (what depths we go to...) I was completely dreading reading some really bad INDIE book but this YA 'coming of age' tale is really quite good. Well written, economic and atmospheric...good characters and an unexpected plot. Ok, it's not going to win a Pulizer but then again, neither is Koontz or King or Clancy. 

Now, here's an idea who's time has come and which might p' off a good number of members - Could it be that the INDIE world has such a bad reputation due to the massive quantity of YAPR, twilight rips and general unoriginal Horror, Sci-fi, Fantasy clone copy dreck being hoisted on the reading world as ORIGINAL? 

Aside from the previously mentioned titles I am interested in reading Terry's book 'Chase' and Sam's book 'Deriliction of Duty.' 

It certainly can't hurt someone to read something INDIE if only to get a sense of how their writting stacks up to the pack.

David Gordon Burke
(Copy and pasted and fonts went funky)


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## movieman (Jan 29, 2014)

David Gordon Burke said:


> Now, here's an idea who's time has come and which might p' off a good number of members - Could it be that the INDIE world has such a bad reputation due to the massive quantity of YAPR, twilight rips and general unoriginal Horror, Sci-fi, Fantasy clone copy dreck being hoisted on the reading world as ORIGINAL?



Last time I went looking in the Horror section at a book store, 90% of the shelves were taken up by Twilight ripoffs and 'Orson Welles, Zombie Hunter' novels. So excuse me if I laugh at any suggestion that trade-published books are ORIGINAL.

There are plenty of good indie novels out there, but I've yet to find one I'd call great. I've been lax on my fiction reading for the last couple of years, but, for example, I read one of Tara Mayer's series on a business trip recently and liked them even though they're aimed more at a female audience. Then again, I haven't found any trade-published novels lately that I'd call great, either.

Where I have found great indie books are in the non-fiction; many people have been indie-publishing memoirs that either they didn't want to submit to trade publishers, or the publishers wouldn't touch. For example, there was a good one by a guy who did bomb disposal in Vietnam, and another by a guy who was called up for the Gulf War, but it ended before he got there. For the latter, I'm sure any trade publisher would have said 'WTF? You never even got the the Gulf! Who'd want to read this crap?' but I liked it as much as his other book about guarding nuclear missiles during the Cold War ('WTF? You never shot anyone! You never fired a missile! Who'd want to read this crap?').

Edit: I should probably add that I'm also about 80% of the way through a great trade-published memoir at the moment by a juvenile delinquent doing National Service in the 50s, so that's not exclusive to indies.


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## Caragula (Jan 29, 2014)

Looks like that DB Jackson won a literary prize, it is good prose too, a touch cheesy for me, but no doubting it is well constructed and a pleasure to follow with a good eye for detail.

I read the Guardian a lot, and a while back they asked their readers to help them find the next self published equivalent of George RR Martin, someone truly exceptional.  What followed were hundreds of comments by self published authors advertising their work.

OK I thought, I'll take each one in turn, "Look Inside" on Amazon and see if any of them have got something that keeps me reading.

I think I did about fifty or sixty, of which one was nice enough that I was a few pages in before I knew it and happy to go along with it.

Every single other one was turgid, the worst with full stops and commas or capital letters missing.

All these authors had websites, and on some of those I visited they were talking about their marketing efforts and pricing strategies and yet the work itself was dreadful.  I'm conscious as I write this that I could just be being mean and looking for the worst in order to prove my point of view, but honestly, it was really hard work to keep going.

It does make me wonder about how writers learning their craft can get more help.  This forum is a great place to go for localised critique on copy, the close edit stuff, and a great place to share experiences, but it seems there are an awful lot of people that haven't got some sort of quality control framework, whether that's paying copy editors or having friends who are willing to be honest, or writing partners that they can critique each other on, or writing courses and workshops and groups and so on.

All these things exist, but without the understanding of how they can help, without taking the plunge then seeing the improvement on the far side, I think it's no wonder so many writers put their work out there genuinely believing it's got a shot at the big time when it hasn't.

It's not a problem that can be solved.  The mountain of sludge will persist.  The only way to breast it is to write something excellent, and then market it.  It isn't going to happen without critique and collaboration, I'm convinced of that.

I would also like to dispute David's claim at the top that implies there is, in a sense, 'just as much' crap that's published as not.  I see a clear difference between what I read of the intros on almost all self published work vs anything I've ever read that got published.  The difference isn't in terms of quality of story and characters and drama etc. it's just the basic technicalities.  I know that's anecdotal evidence, but I see a gulf, not a marginal distinction here.


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## Dmarcotte (Jan 29, 2014)

It is true that it is very hard to find quality books these days. However I think that is where a forum like this can really help - if we writers read each other's books and spread the word or post reviews directly onto Amazon/Barnes&Noble/Apple etc then the books worth reading will actually get read by many more people. It will take time, but eventually the professional writers will rise to the top.


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## David Gordon Burke (Jan 29, 2014)

Dmarcotte said:


> It is true that it is very hard to find quality books these days. However I think that is where a forum like this can really help - if we writers read each other's books and spread the word or post reviews directly onto Amazon/Barnes&Noble/Apple etc then the books worth reading will actually get read by many more people. It will take time, but eventually the professional writers will rise to the top.



You read my mind on that one.  I am doing a lot of hunting for INDIE writers who have their work out there.  Sales are nice - critical acclaim under public scrutiny in the long run?  Even better.

I don't know if this is / might be a bending or breaking of the forum rules ... my apologies if so and I won't take offense if this post is deleted but...
Anyone who has a book on Amazon who would like to exchange reviews can feel free to PM me.  I have two books ahead of me to read with other (non-forum) writers but since it has been mentioned again and again that REVIEWS are the way to break into the market, and since we all seem to be a huge, captive audience here, why not show a bit of solidarity?  (I have made this offer to a few people who didn't take me up on it...even before I uploaded my own work)  


Returning to the topic...it seems to me that there is absolutely nothing wrong with some so so (OK, downright stinky) novels going the INDIE route.  Hell, have you read James Patterson?  If the legitimate publishing houses can sell %$_^#$%@ then why not the INDIES?

David Gordon Burke


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## Morkonan (Jan 29, 2014)

David Gordon Burke said:


> ....Returning to the topic...it seems to me that there is absolutely nothing wrong with some so so (OK, downright stinky) novels going the INDIE route.  Hell, have you read James Patterson?  If the legitimate publishing houses can sell %$_^#$%@ then why not the INDIES?
> 
> David Gordon Burke



I have read traditionally published works, which have even managed to become popular series, that seem to be nothing more than an "I CAN SPELLCHECK" declaration by the author.

I am very serious. Seriously, even... I'm so serious because this is why I decided to pursue writing in the first place. I've always wanted to write and always have, but I never decided to get serious about it until I came across the mountain of complete garbage being produced by a number of popular authors. And, that mountain continues to grow...

I hope to not add to it.


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