{"id":46,"date":"2011-10-25T20:36:00","date_gmt":"2011-10-25T20:36:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/indie-books-a-tsunami-of\/"},"modified":"2011-10-25T20:36:00","modified_gmt":"2011-10-25T20:36:00","slug":"indie-books-a-tsunami-of","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/indie-books-a-tsunami-of\/","title":{"rendered":"Indie Books: A Tsunami of….?"},"content":{"rendered":"
You hear a lot of talk in the publishing world these days about indie published ebooks.\u00a0 Some think they’re nothing short of the salvation of western civilization because they allow authors to connect directly to readers.\u00a0 Others, to a large extent publishers, editors, and agents, insist that indie publishing will bury us all under a tsunami of crap.\u00a0 And of course you every possible position in between those two extremes.<\/p>\n

A couple of days ago, Passive Guy at The Passive Voice<\/a>, posted something<\/a> about a publisher reporting ebook sales.\u00a0 In the comments section, Mick Griggs included a link to this essay<\/a>.\u00a0 (Thanks, PG and Mick.)<\/p>\n

Mark Williams, the author of that essay insists, quite convincingly, that instead of\u00a0 a tsunami of crap, we’re starting to see a tsunami of excellence.\u00a0 If you have an ereader, are thinking about buying an ereader, or even interested in what effect ereaders and epublishing will have on your future book buying, you should check that essay out.<\/p>\n

I decided to do a little commentary myself, based on some things I’ve posted lately over at Adventures Fantastic<\/i><\/a>.
<\/a>
I’ve looked at four indie ebooks in the last month.\u00a0 Those books were Tisarian’s Treasure<\/i><\/a>, Age of Giants:\u00a0 Awakening<\/i><\/a>, Dark Heroes<\/a>,<\/i> and Stones<\/a>.<\/i>\u00a0 The links in the previous sentence are to the reviews.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Now, this analysis is completely unscientific; statistically speaking, my sample size is too small to be significant.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Still, as a snapshot, it is an informative look at what’s going on in the adventure and fantasy fields.\u00a0 Two of the books, Tisarian’s Treasure<\/i> and Dark Heroes<\/i>, are available in print editions as well as electronic formats.\u00a0 The question is, are these publications crap?<\/p>\n

When dealing with electronic publishing, crap can be defined two ways.\u00a0 One is the quality of the writing itself.\u00a0 The other is the formatting.\u00a0 I’ll address the latter first, since formatting is something that can be changed fairly easily after publication compared to print books.\u00a0 With the partial exception of Dark Heroes<\/i>, with which I had some issues in regard to no table of contents, all the books listed above were well formatted, had decent to great cover art that reflected the content, and were well laid out and organized.<\/p>\n

The quality of the works varied a little, because Dark Heroes<\/i> was an anthology and some of the stories didn’t resonate with me as well as others, but all were at the worst well written and highly readable.\u00a0 The better written stories flowed, grabbed me, and made me want to read more.\u00a0 Given that these books started at $0.99, and most major publishers’ electronic books start at $6.99 or $7.99, I’d say any one of the four I’ve looked at are a better buy than almost anything coming out of major New York houses.<\/p>\n

Like I said, I realize my sample size isn’t a representative cross-section of what’s out there.\u00a0 But I want to argue that it doesn’t have to be.\u00a0 I’m old enough to know what I like.\u00a0 I’m going to pick up books that I think will appeal to my tastes and preferences.\u00a0 That doesn’t mean everything I read will, but I load the odds in my favor.\u00a0 I also like a lot of variety and am not afraid to try something new from time to time.\u00a0 Indie publishing provides that at affordable prices.<\/p>\n

When was the last time you saw something really new come out of New York publishing?\u00a0 The majority of books from major publishers look fairly interchangeable to me.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Is there crap in the world of indie publishing?\u00a0 Yes.\u00a0 Sturgeon’s Law, remember?\u00a0 But clearly there’s excellence out there, too.\u00a0 New York publishing has gotten so afraid of taking risks that we’re being given a steady diet of the same old thing.\u00a0 Indie writers are finding an audience that they haven’t been able to find through major houses.\u00a0 More power to them.<\/p>\n

Oh, and that tsunami of crap that New York publishers, editors, and agents say we’ll be drowning in?\u00a0 I agree, we are drowning in a tsunami of crap.\u00a0 I just don’t think it’s coming from indie<\/i> publishing.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You hear a lot of talk in the publishing world these days about indie published ebooks.\u00a0 Some think they’re nothing short of the salvation of western civilization because they allow authors to connect directly to readers.\u00a0 Others, to a large extent publishers, editors, and agents, insist that indie publishing will bury us all under a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[69,68,42,67,66],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-age-of-giants","category-dark-heroes","category-electronic-publishing","category-stones","category-tisarians-treasure"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3P5pJ-K","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}