Tags
I joined a forum for self-publishing ebook authors a little while back, but found it depressing. Many of the posts were about how easy it is to write a book or two a month. One guy bragged that he writes 10,000 words/day until he “gets to the end of a book” in about five days, then publishes it immediately and starts the next one. Everybody seemed to think that his speed was admirable. The common wisdom around those parts seems to be that the best way to make money in the Kindle Store is to put as many books as possible into it, as quickly as possible, and then put some more.
This feels like another ugly bubble to me. I’ve lived through a few of those. One or two people have success at something, some new business model with its own power and attraction and inevitability, so then a million people try to do exactly the same thing — but most do it poorly and quickly. Then it all collapses when the weight of the awful overtakes the buoyancy of the new business model. The good goes away with the bad, and the whole way of doing things gets discredited, for a while.
I hope that doesn’t happen with self-publishing ebooks, but I think it will, and I don’t see how to stop it. The only thing that could stop it is if self-publishing authors started exhibiting more discipline about what they publish, and how often, and how thoroughly they’ve made sure it’s worth publishing, serving as finicky curators of their own work. That won’t happen, probably. So it’s just a matter of time before the bubble collapses, I guess.
I can write quickly. But I never finish anything that I write quickly. I’m talking about fiction, I mean. I like to let words sit on the screen while I think about them — sometimes for days. Switch out a verb here, a tense there, move a dependent clause to the beginning of a sentence, or the end. I like to dig as deep as I can into a storyline, and get to a certain point and realize it’s unworkable, then start over.
This has resulted in me being 47 years old with only one published book to my name, though. I’m not saying my way is “the right way.”
I have to think there’s some kind of happy medium. Surely?
Yes, there’s a happy medium, and to get a better look, you need to get off that forum. Most of the people on the Kindleboards Writer’s Cafe have no sympathy for that kind of writing/insta-publishing nonsense.
Writing fast isn’t the problem, really. It’s writing fast and then publishing without bothering to do the followup work that makes it worth reading. I write fast once a year, during NaNoWriMo, but even then, I don’t churn out 10,000 words a day. And some of my NaNo novels don’t get published for a year or two. Still, there are people who’ve been writing for a long time, who’ve honed their skills, and who are also fast typists (that last is really important), so they aren’t necessarily turning out crap. Lots of happy mediums between the extremes.
Well I admit I’m impressed by 10K a day, but publish immediately after 5 days?
I’m not entirely convinced it’s a bubble. I mean, there’s an aspect of it that will crest and then ebb, but I don’t think that will make the medium go away. Remember at one point there was a general feeling that there were too many people making webcomics? And then abandoning them–that’ll happen with eBooks too, but I’m not sure that’ll make the entire landscape go away.
At least… I hope so. Because, you know.
But webcomics were (with a few misguided — ha! — exceptions) free. That makes a difference I think.
well that just gives the webfiction crowd the edge we need to survive the purge.
10K a day?! I’d be happy with 2K but even then I’d probably be looking at several days of rewriting and polishing – then walking away and leaving it for a while before finishing it as a first draft.
I think you’re right that if the ‘insta-writers’ saturate the market with dross then readers are going to find it hard to identify the worthwhile reads.
However – as an author with three novels out there at the moment – I hope that Christopher is right that the bubble isn’t going to burst!
Not sure what the answer is. I don’t think we want to all have to go through e-publishing companies as that’s going to take away our independence and you can’t just rely on reviews as, sadly, it’s too easy to get the kinds of ‘friends & family’ 5* reviews that I’ve seen on books that then turn out to be pretty awful – weak plot, badly written and poorly formatted. Any other ideas?