22Nov

Everything That’s Wrong With Ebooks

• Saved in: Craft, Fiction Writing, Indie Publishing, Journalism, Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), Mystery Writing, Publishing & the Marketplace, Speechwriting, Technical Writing, Writers, Writing Experiences
• by Chris Orcutt
• with 3 Comments

So I was brows­ing Kin­dle books on Ama­zon ear­li­er today and came upon one that thor­ough­ly pissed me off.

Tru­ly, this book rep­re­sents every­thing that’s wrong with ebooks.

In the con­tent, adver­tis­ing and book cov­er, the author details how a writer can write a book a week, and how turn­ing out such a quan­ti­ty of “writ­ing” is the key to mak­ing a lot of mon­ey on Kin­dle.

Let’s talk about this, shall we?

Yes, you can get rich writ­ing a book a week—when most of your “books” are 50 or few­er Kin­dle pages, and when you’re writ­ing books about how to make mon­ey writ­ing books for Kin­dle.

Not so easy is writ­ing a real book a week—say a nov­el. I’d like to see Fos­ter live up to his adver­tised max­im that the quan­ti­ty and the qual­i­ty have to be there, if he were try­ing to write a nov­el a week.

I’ve read a num­ber of these ebooks about “get­ting rich writ­ing books for Kin­dle,” and as a life­long writer who has earned a liv­ing as a jour­nal­ist, tech­ni­cal writer, scriptwriter and speech­writer (in addi­tion to nov­el­ist), I find their com­mon asser­tion that there’s noth­ing to this, that any­one can do it, not only insult­ing but also dis­hon­est.

Writ­ing is like any oth­er spe­cial­ized skill: It takes years and thou­sands of hours of study and prac­tice to do it well. Just as I would­n’t expect that I could go into a den­tist’s office tomor­row and begin fill­ing teeth, no one should expect that they can sit down and dash off an ebook in a week that will make them a lot of mon­ey.

The main prob­lem I have with Fos­ter’s “book,” as well as all of the oth­ers that advo­cate writ­ing a quan­ti­ty of work for Kin­dle, is that they pro­mote a writ­ing-as-lot­tery men­tal­i­ty. They pro­mote the idea that a per­son can just churn out a “book,” and that the pos­si­bil­i­ty exists that they’ll make tens of thou­sands, or mil­lions, of dol­lars from the book with lit­tle effort.

This writ­ing-as-lot­tery men­tal­i­ty is bad for Kin­dle and indie-pub­lished books in gen­er­al because it low­ers the over­all qual­i­ty of the work out there, and it rein­forces the idea among read­ers and lit­er­ary opin­ion-mak­ers that ebooks (espe­cial­ly indie titles) are junk. Well, we writ­ers who have worked long and hard at our craft, and who strive to give read­ers excel­lent qual­i­ty work for their mon­ey, resent this.

We resent ebooks like Fos­ter’s, as well as those that adver­tise that it’s easy to amp-up sales of your cur­rent books with a few sim­ple changes to your book list­ings on Ama­zon. I have read prob­a­bly a dozen of these titles, each time con­vinc­ing myself that this one is dif­fer­ent, that this one con­tains the keys to the king­dom. Guess what? NONE of them do. These authors are sim­ply get­ting rich on our desire to sell more of our work, and any of the “fix­es” that they sug­gest, if they help sales at all, are mere­ly tem­po­rary.

F. Scott Fitzger­ald said, “You don’t write because you want to say some­thing; you write because you have some­thing to say.” Don’t allow your work to become part of the glut of mediocre ebooks on Ama­zon; have some­thing to say, a sto­ry to tell, and put your absolute best work out there—every time. You might not rake in the mon­ey as Fos­ter and his ilk do, but you can take pride in the idea that you are only pub­lish­ing good work, and that if you’re sud­den­ly tak­en from this earth tomor­row, you at least will have left some­thing of sub­stance, of your­self, behind.

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