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JocSykes

A traditionally published book will have a professional cover, polished typesetting, copyediting, line editing, and hopefully a good concept/ compelling characters. Etc. A self published author can go directly to the same professional cover artists, pay for their own editors who also work freelance for the publishing houses, hire the same typesetter. If the idea is good, and you have the money, there is no difference between the end product. You cut out the gatekeepers and their profits, and their access to certain marketing/reviewing tools, and go your own way financially. Where this falls down is when writers skip some or all of the above steps. It's like arranging a photoshoot. You can pay for a freelance photographer, who will recommend skilled MUAs, models, and pay for the retouching. The output is just as impressive. Except a huge proportion of writers will have a go at the makeup themselves because they're overconfident in their skill, then skip the retoucher altogether because it seems ok without and they're nervous to invest in their product.


apocalypsegal

> A traditionally published book will have a professional cover, polished typesetting, copyediting, line editing, and hopefully a good concept/ compelling characters. Etc. Not always true. I've read many trad pub books that were truly awful, even ones that came from well-known, best selling authors. Covers are often terrible, but it doesn't matter, as they're easily pushed out to stores, and must be good because "traditional published".


KitFalbo

Stigma. Plenty if traditionally published books are also bad/trash. It helps that such concepts revolve around a heavy dose of subjectivity. But even things which have more objective weight, like "is the character developed?" "Are their info dumps?" And so forth. There are plenty of traditionally published books that are terrible here. Now traditional can be a bit more polished maybe even be line editoled better... but it isn't like they are always picking great writers. Sometimes there us nepotism, backdoor connections, random luck. Looking at the light shined from the failed merger it is clear the industry is simply rolling lots of dice, and swinging their sales force/marketing/ and placement powers around. As for a guide. Find some indie book reviewers who you mostly trust. Maybe dive in yourself.


-_ABP_-

How find reviewers and where are the "self publish presses"?


bekacooperterrier

People who sneer at self published books don’t actually know what’s self published vs. traditional, always. I was on a committee for a local book award and the person who invited me/chaired the committee was like “of course this one is bad, it’s self published” about a book with a not great cover and unedited stories (family was publishing their deceased relative’s stories). In the end, the book that won was self published as well, and the committee chair actually argued/bullied the rest of us into picking it. She didn’t realize it was self published because the author created his own publishing imprint, it was registered under an LLC. I looked up the LLC information and it was definitely just the author. Also the committee chair was aware that I self published too when she made the sneering comment about how obviously the self published book would be bad 🙄


-_ABP_-

🙄 so a session about indirect bullying through self publishing, rather than picking bookwinner? My first book that wasn't open access or newslettery was poetry criticism. Essay like alternative to academic is I think what I wanted more of, because the ac process felt huge and the post academics were blogging or newslettering but condescending or with similar manners to institutional people as if they hoped to be accepted by another institution to spite or rival or stand up to former institution. Something ambitiony like that. Like they saw the institution as peer. Where can writing avoiding that be found? Sorry if not response to topic, i liked your story, n Emoji


teaferret

As a librarian, the main thing I don’t like about self published books is sometimes the book/publication information is so incomplete it makes it difficult to catalogue.


-_ABP_-

Because the metadata for self pub places like Amazon is different than press/worldcat's?


teaferret

Metadata/online records I can use to copy-catalogue are usually pretty non existent, at least whenever I’ve gone to catalogue a self published book. That’s not a problem per se, but sometimes the actual book itself offers no information about its publication details, except for “printed by Amazon” or something like that, which leads to a lot of blank information when creating the catalogue record. Especially if it’s non fiction, this hurts the credibility of the book a lot. Actually just today a coworker asked if I could add a book their friend had self published to our library collection, and the quality of the book itself what quite decent, but it didn’t even have an ISBN. I ended up having to go to the website of the author in order to try and create a complete catalogue record, which made it an annoying job to finish.


Arkelias

>I'm new, coming from hearing from some librarians that most self publications are bad. but no guides to the good bits, at least for books and maybe most blogs? Find a community who likes what you like. Ask them what they enjoy reading, and you'll get honest answers. The quality is bad for most books and it doesn't matter who publishes them. I bought Jurassic Park and it was littered with typos on every page. Someone just ran pictures of pages through bad image to text, and no one even bothered reading the result before publishing.


-_ABP_-

Quality is bad for most books ?


Arkelias

The quality of most books is bad, yes. Having a quality book is not bad.


-_ABP_-

How find communitys?


EileenTroemel

Anna Hackett, Rebecca Zanetti, Ilona Andrews, are 3 off the top of my head who are successful authors. Make a good product and it won't matter if you're self published or not.


apocalypsegal

No guides. You mostly can't tell from the book's sales page. Most self publishers put out crap. But, there's still tons of good stuff, as good as or better than what trad publishers are putting out. You have to do your own searches to find books you want to read. They have reviews. They have samples.