All self-published authors are up against a few pitfalls.
To my knowledge, the advantage to getting published traditionally (in addition to them doing marketing) comes down to polish. They hone the story, handle formatting, and make sure what they put out is so polished that it positively glitters.
As a self-published author, I do my damndest to give my work the best polish I can. I pay a cover artist and an editor, and I go over my work multiple times before publishing it.
But – while my editors have been good, they still miss things. And even after I run an edit of their edits, I still miss a thing or two as well.
The effort is there. And I believe that it shows.
Not all self-published books get treated with such care. Sometimes, no matter how much polish is applied, you can’t polish a turd.
When you come across such a work – and it’s well-reviewed and even clearly selling at decent numbers – it’s massively disheartening. I put a lot of time, effort – and yes, money, too – into my work. What’s that all about?
Comparison is never a good idea. That way lies madness. But it’s still good to recognize these pitfalls in being self-published.
I’d like to elaborate, and some of the polished turds and the pitfalls with them that I’ve come across in the self-published world.
Formatting issues
Every morning, I read at least one chapter of fiction and one chapter of nonfiction.
Recently, a nonfiction book caught my eye – so I downloaded it and started to read it.
At first, it was not bad. But as I get into it – errors are cropping up. And some are rather glaring.
For example – I reached more than one random question at the end of a paragraph. It wasn’t tied into what I just read – so what was that about?
It occurred to me that the random questions should have been subheadings. Oh! That makes more sense.
Then it started to appear that there was a lot of missed proper sentence endings, odd phrases, and a few other issues of formatting that were becoming hard to ignore.
As the formatting issues became increasingly glaring, I started to question all of what I was reading. And while it started strong – it was getting more and more formulaic, diverging from the topic of the overall book, and increasingly sloppy.
My disappointment began to turn to ire. How is this work so well-reviewed? I don’t get it.
This book is well represented on Amazon – and looks professional as such. But I am increasingly unimpressed and disappointed. Polished turd, indeed.
I don’t think that’s what they meant to write
During the pandemic, I was fortunate to get several voice-over jobs reading audiobooks for ACX.
This was great – until I read the books.
They were bad. For many reasons.
To start with – they were clearly either badly translated (probably via Google translate) or plagiarized from multiple sources. The English was atrocious. Not just sentence structure and formatting – I mean bad English – like a non-native speaker you’re meant to laugh at from a movie bad.
And I had to read and record these.
Suffice it to say, more than once I made an on-the-spot edit. Without giving anything away about one of these books – in a section I was reading there was a listing of various proteins one could consume. As I read the list, I came across a word that just didn’t belong: Boobs.
After a fit of laughter, I realized the context, and presume it was supposed to be chicken breasts.
This was a self-published work being recorded as an audiobook. I felt somewhat dirty getting paid to record this garbage – but it was for pay, and if they didn’t give a shit, why should I?
But this is what self-published authors are up against all the time. Anyone can publish to Amazon. It’s not hard to do – and for all the good self-published books, there are probably ten times as many bad books.
Avoiding the self-published pitfalls
It’s important to acknowledge this: I can’t do a thing about all the crap self-published by others.
It’s out there. And there is nothing you or I can do about it. But, fortunately, we’re not truly in competition with those works.
Comparison in this instance is not healthy. Sure, this nonfiction I’ve been reading has a sizable number of excellent reviews. But who’s to say they didn’t cheat that? It’s problematic if Amazon finds you’re cheating when it comes to reviews. But with the number of books available, I’ve no doubt plenty slip through the cracks.
All I can do is my best. It’s up to me to make sure what I produce isn’t a turd – polished or otherwise.
What’s more, being self-published, all marketing is on me. And while I can be frustrated that I came across this polished turd nonfiction – I can choose to finish it or put it down, move on, and review it or not.
My work is all I can do anything about. Thus, it’s up to me to give it my all, get a decent cover artist, and have it edited professionally.
All self-published authors are up against a few pitfalls. While we strive to put out great works independently, we are up against poorly formatted and badly translated works that appear decent on the surface. But beauty, in this instance, is only skin deep.
The best way to avoid these pitfalls is to push yourself to be the best you can be and produce decent books. Maybe they lack the polish of traditionally published books – but they can still stand out without sticking out like a sore thumb.
The more I publish the better I get. I will make a conscious effort to not allow the polished turds to distress or distract me.
That’s how I avoid the self-publishing pitfalls.
Thank you for being part of my ongoing journey, for joining me, and for inspiring me and my craft.
This is the one-hundred and twenty-ninth article exploring the ongoing creative process. Please take a moment to check out the collection of my published works, which can be found here.
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