As someone who reads and reviews a lot of indie novels, I’m happy to say
that the quality of ebooks is starting to improve. It’s possible that part of
this is due to Amazon’s crackdown on those who’ve published books filled with spelling, grammatical, and
formatting problems. Amazon’s warning letters to clean up the mess or have
their books pulled is paying off, which is good news. Authors should show the same care and attention to
producing ebooks as they would if submitting to a traditional
publisher! If you’re an author who has little
time for production, experienced, reputable companies will do it
for you. There are also plenty of scammers, so do your research!
Recently, Amazon changed the rules to now insist that authors place their
table of contents at the front of ebooks, for good reason. As stated in
Nicholas C. Rossis’s blog, scammers been making millions off of KDP’s Select
Program, specifically Kindle Unlimited, where subscribers can borrow an ebook.
In a nutshell, authors are paid for every page read. This has inspired scammers to
create a click-bait-link page at the front of their books which immediately
takes readers to the back and therefore pays the author for all of the pages in
the book, even though those pages haven’t been read. And why would they?
Rossis states that those pages are often filled with junk, multiple
translations, or even unrelated content. Amazon’s attempts to stop this are
proving successful, but we’ll see what happens in the future. One thing about
cheaters, their resourcefulness is astonishingly good.
To that end, I came across another helpful blog from Digital Book World offering
great tips about formatting your ebook. The blog discusses ragged vs. justified
text, hyphens, em dashes, and of course, the table of contents issue. Since I
plan to do more self-publishing in the future, I’ve bookmarked that link.
Things have changed so much from the days when I self-published Taxed to Death and Fatal Encryption. One of the best aspects about this is the bounty of
useful resources to help writers produce a quality product in this hi-tech age.
One note about quality of writing in indie ebooks…I’m starting to see a big
improvement there as well. Many months ago I read blogs from experienced, savvy
authors who stated that those writers more interested in making money than
writing would fall by the wayside; that the serious writers would start
releasing quality content regularly. This trend has started and I’m delighted
to see it.
I’m still working on preparing my quality content, but one day…
3 comments:
This is all good news for me, as a reader and as a writer! :)
Well said. Debi. I didn't know about the scam. I guess there is always one going around.
For me, I couldn't live without a professional proofreader. I can't see my own mistakes. I just submitted a manuscript and when the editor got back to my with the first pass, I'd used you're instead of your in two places. How embarrassing. I know the difference, but my eye couldn't see it. Could you imagine if I'd published that on Amazon. Here's my shout out the thank all awesome editors and proofreaders.
Thanks for your comments Marian and Kristina! Yes, good proofreaders and editors are worth their weight in gold, and kudos to Amazon for wanting to do something poorly formatted books filled with errors.
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