Saturday, February 26, 2005

Second class citizens

There's a link to Zippy's blog above. I confess I haven't visited her (his?) blog before; I followed a link from Maili's blog to read Zippy's comments on e-publishing. Zippy says: "I view e-pubbed and self-pubbed books as the second class citizens of the publishing world."

Obviously I disagree with this statement *g*, but I do agree with what touched off the rant. I quote: "This was brought on by another e-pubbed author rant about how she's too good for traditional publishing, how traditional publishers didn't get what she needed to write." And further down her rant: "Don't go on a website or blog how you're too good for traditional publishing."

Too true. I've said this before, but IMHO it doesn't benefit e-pubbed authors at all when we go on and on about our books are too special for New York, that New York doesn't get what we're trying to do, yadda yadda yadda. Whether it's true or not, that comes across as unnecessarily defensive. Even worse are the comments that e-pubbed authors sometimes make, that all the good authors are in e-publishing and everything New York publishes is crap. Folks, that simply isn't true. There are lots of good books in New York, and lots of good books in e-publishing.

And yes, sometimes e-publishers will publish stuff that probably would be rejected in New York (my time travel NEVER LOVE A STRANGER is a good example of a weird book that likely wouldn't be accepted by a major publisher), but frequently they publish books that are perfectly mainstream (my contemporary ALL I EVER WANTED is a good example). NCP and EC books are both now available in Waldenbooks, which suggests that at least one major bookstore finds them mainstream enough for the general public.

I will remark, though, that I don't agree with Zippy's comments about poor editing quality in e-pubbed books: "Edit the content to remove blatent continuity errors and clean up the plot so the reader can suspend their disbelief, as opposed to laughing their ass off at how unrealistic it is. Copy edit or at the very least run spell check once or twice." Zippy says s/he's read one self-pubbed book and one e-pubbed book. Two remarks: Self-pubbed and e-pubbed are not at all the same thing. And one sample is not adequate to get a handle on what is being produced by e-publishers. Yes, there are some sucky books out there in e-publishing, but there are fewer and fewer of them nowadays. My books are clean, with no misspellings or errors in grammar to speak of (I won't assert there are NO misspellings... I am human, not superhuman:-) and I've read plenty of others that are well edited, too.

Zippy, I can't find a place to comment on your blog, but if you want to read one of my ebooks, let me know and I'll send you one. I swear to you that they're adequately edited *g*.

2 comments:

  1. *sigh* This is a subject I long to blog about, but just know it wouldn't come across right. I don't express my opinions well. Sasha, while she insists that I need to speak out about this, admits that I do sometimes come across as a diva. Since I'm e-pubbed myself, against the recommendation of my agent, I don't want to come across as diva-ish so I keep my mouth shut. I will however say that I do agree that e-published authors who get defensive only make the situation worse.

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