I’ve just had two weeks off work. I will go back on Monday and everyone
will say, ‘Oh did you have a good holiday? Was it relaxing?” They will look
fresh and tanned from their break and I will look haggard and unwell, crawling
into my office to deal with emails and phone messages and shutting the door
behind me. I wanted to do gardening
and paint the shelves that have been sitting in the living room glaring at me
all holiday, but what I actually did
was very different. I re-read four of my novels, currently out on Amazon,
editing until I was bug eyed, just to make sure that what the reader gets at
the end of the day, is a slick, well-presented piece of work, which can rival
any traditionally published novel.
Why would I do that? Why spend two weeks of my life polishing something
that is already selling just fine in the world arena?
The answer is, that although indie writers are currently getting a
slating out in the e-book industry, there are those of us who really care what
we are producing.
I uploaded my fourth novel late one night and enjoyed that familiar
feeling of satisfaction and ‘job done’ only to get an email from a friend the
next day, who had downloaded it on the other side of the world. Now there is a
perception that indie writers sling up any old rubbish with a cover, just to
make money, but the reality is very different. Something had happened in the
upload process that made the font go really big in one chapter and nowhere
else. The original word document however, looked absolutely fine.
It is truly the most sickening feeling, to have uploaded your faulty
brain child for all the world to laugh at and criticise – as if author sensitivity isn’t bad enough already. I had to go to
work, knowing that it was ‘out there’ disgracing me all day and there was
nothing I could do about it. My poor husband walked through the door that
night, greeted by my pleading face and my laptop – even before he had got his
coat off. Thank goodness he is in IT and an incredible trouble shooter, because
I never would have worked it out. My teenage daughter came up at one point,
nervously eyeing my blithering self, watching anxiously over his shoulder as he
did surgery - and made a comment that, ‘Oh yeah, loads of them do that, it’s
annoying.’ I didn’t care that it was obviously a fairly common thing, it wasn’t
going to happen to my wonderful piece of blood, sweat, tears and tantrums!
There are people out there writing trash for money; that is sadly true.
And worse still, they are joining these five star review scams to push
themselves up the food chain. Often it is pornographic rubbish that some of us
would reject just on the cover alone. Speech marks aren’t required for the
grunts and groans and semi-colons are not part of the apparatus. But they will be found out and the discerning
readers, who don’t want the equivalent of a badly written top shelf magazine,
will help them to cascade down to the annals of the 900,000’s in the ranks.
Eventually. Hopefully.
For the rest of us, it’s probably not about money. I conducted a survey
recently only to find that most writers in the groups I am part of, have full
time jobs. Writing is their passion, not their income generator. Our novels and
musings are not just our intellectual property, they are our legacy. If we have
done a great job, our characters are not just made-up-people, they are our
friends and we feel deeply for them.
Next time you pick up an indie novel by accident, just think about what
you are holding on to. It is, as the Maori say, a taonga – a treasure. It is likely that someone during its creation,
shed real tears and hoped that you would love it.
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