The Wall Street Journal ran a story in early December called “How I Became a Best-Selling Author…” It prominently featured Darcie Chan who reluctantly self-published her novel The Mill River Recluse. Despite her sales success Chan was still interested in finding a major publisher. Why? One reason she cited was her desire to have her book professionally edited.
Yet on December 29th Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos congratulated Chan for writing one of the “best-selling Kindle books of the year.”
It’s troubling to think that a best-selling author recognizes her book needs help but doesn’t take steps to make it what it could be.
And what does that say about reader standards? Are we unable to discern quality writing or worse yet, maybe we don’t care? Perhaps as readers we’ll adapt to self-edited writing, misspelled words and poorly “typeset” eBooks in the same way that we accept poor mobile phone voice quality.
I am not a writer but in my role as a technology consultant to publishers I do know this: look for quality to become a bigger issue this coming year. If readers won’t demand it the retailers like Amazon, Apple and Barnes & Noble will, at least when it comes to spelling and design.
As for editing there are many options for finding a good editor. One of those options is the Editorial Freelance Association. They have chapters around the US and in fact I’ll be speaking to the LA Chapter next Monday. I hope you can make it.
PS. Maybe we need to replace the “best” in best-sellers with the word “most”, as in most-sellers.
Very good! You are pointing out a big problem nobody else is talking about.
We can hope e-books will get better, but it might not happen unless more people point it out.
There’s an old saying by Piet Hein, which is about why it may not happen. It’s something like “The writer who can’t write are read by readers who can’t read.”
Let’s encourage our literate friends to write reviews encouraging the “best” and maybe the authors and Amazon will get the hint!