Embracing Change

It would seem Sue Grafton caused a bit of a stir in the Indie (self publishing) world this last week or so. I personally thought what she said carried a lot of truth. There are a lot of good Indie ideas out there but also a lot of books published way before they're ready. Mostly that's because every book at some stage isn't very good, no matter who has written it. Good books are crafted. Once you have the first draft you need to edit and proof - two vital stages that many Indie authors don't realise exist or don't embrace because they require time and cost. I have written often on this subject and I'm not going to talk about that here.

What I do want to briefly discuss is change. Humans typically don't like it. The world we grow up in is our world, the normal world. The world that evolves away from what we know can be daunting and frightening for some people. We particularly refuse change when our current world offers us a position of power and accomplishment, especially if we worked hard for it. Nobody can deny Sue Grafton's wariness of this new world, where anyone can throw 60,000 words into a Word doco and call it a book. But we do need to accept publishing is changing and it will never be the same. If you want in on the ride you're going to need to embrace change, or at least study its evolution.

I read a fair number of Indie books because that's the world I function in. At the beginning of the year I was approached by an Indie author who was about to release her book. I'm also a high ranked Amazon reviewer. Would I review her book? I read it and despaired at the woefully stilted dialogue, story telling that’s almost constantly expositional and pages littered with endless inconsistencies. I struggled mightily, commended her for a good idea I thought needed a lot more work and never heard from her again, at all. The book as is, was published that month and went on to become one of the biggest selling Indie books on Amazon during 2012.

I'm always going to lament the publication of an unfinished book but I'm not going to bemoan the author her success, not for one second. Indie publishing is showing us there is an audience beyond the strict genres spoon fed to us for decades. The audience is wide and there is to some extent a level of novelty and experimentation, both from writers and readers. You might consider the parallels between the current change and the modernist wave of the late 19th and early 20th century. You can bet there was an equally wide scope of experimentation and outcry as modernist writing took shape. It is the audience that will determine this publishing future as it's up to authors to seek out new directions.

Another Indie author come blogger: Ashley Barron, recently considered Christmas 2013 would be a threshold for digital publishing. I'm not sure it will happen that quick but Indie publishing will go through a great many changes in the coming years. Amazon's core philosophy across their business is to create a platform you will go to before any other. The moment the digital publishing novelty wears thin and people start looking elsewhere for quality, they will shift policy. Probably Amazon will see the need to change before we will. I personally think they will generate long term consumer confidence in digital publishing by introducing publisher subscriptions and annual maintenance fees, or something along those lines, which will see the demise of the truly independent author. I noticed last week the first viable competitor to Smashwords in Autharium, a digital equivalent of an Indie distributor who will only publish your book once it passes a number of human assessed quality tests. Autharium don't charge to publish but do take a percentage profits. So they are equally invested in quality or they don't make money.

Change is inevitable, sometimes it happens suddenly, often it evolves slowly. Complaining about it and deriding it, as I'm sure people did throughout the modernist movement, is more detrimental in this commercial age where authority counts for less and consumerism rules. We can either sit here bitching about it, or get our heads down and make sure we leave our own footprints in history.