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Since purchasing my Kindle eReader I have found a great deal of pleasure reading the books written by the independents and no name authors. Although some have type O's and less word count I find them to be more original and less a slave to the same old same old.
These are people who write for the love of the story and I can't fault them a bit. Another advantage is the price. Unknown authors tend to charge a lot less for their work. LOL
I rescently read the second book in the series Death Spiral by James Boedeker.
It like the first book is a fast paced, page turner. I love the characters and when I finished, I felt like I knew them as friends.
I left a review and to my surprise it was answered by the author.
This isn't the first time an author took the time to thank me for a review, but I have never heard from a big name author no matter what review I posted.
I like helping someone live the dream. Boedeker told me he set simple goals.
1. To write a story begining to end and make it readable.
2. To be published
3. To have one person who didn't know him read his story and like it. He thanked me for helping him achieve his goal.
We the reader have a measure of power. We can help the dreams of others come true.
i second that post. While i can get any e-book i want thru our local library and at times I do, I have also tried some of those "freebies" when i first got my nook. And while some have been ok (no different then what i've found with big name authors), others have been very well written and in fact I do read thru on their series whether add'l books are free or not. And as they are new authors it can be easier to follow them and support them, and as stated have them acknowledge your comments.
Some of my favorite authors are lesser known or indie authors. But I'm not going to support an author just because they are indie. While I like the idea of supporting "the little guy", self publishing churns out far more crap than it does gems. It can be worth it when you find the gems but filtering through the crap requires a good personal vetting system and I will not hesitate to give a book a negative review regardless of who the author is or how they were published.
Some of my favorite authors are lesser known or indie authors. But I'm not going to support an author just because they are indie. While I like the idea of supporting "the little guy", self publishing churns out far more crap than it does gems. It can be worth it when you find the gems but filtering through the crap requires a good personal vetting system and I will not hesitate to give a book a negative review regardless of who the author is or how they were published.
yeah i'm not one to chase indie authors, bands, etc only over "mainstream". In my case, i had a new nook, and wanted to play around and dump in some "Free" books to try it all out. I stuck with thsoe that had higher reviews, and for most part have been pleasantly surprised.
I compare it to following a local band one likes. You like what you hear, buy their self produced cd's, and in some cases feel it sounds better then what may be on the charts. And you find your support at that level may mean more to them then being one of thousands who download tunes from a 'popular' artist.
Like the rest of you I can be a bit picky in my tastes. I detest reading chapters of nothing but filler or when an author attempts to impress with vocabulary lessons. I also detest a series that does nothing more than tell the same story all over again.
I seldom leave a negative review unless the story was so flat as to be unreadable. I recognize that sometimes a story is just not written to my taste. It doesn't mean it was a bad story or poorly written. It just means not for me.
I have seen reviews that could be considered petty at best and character assasination at worst. As I said in my first post. The editing is sometimes lacking, I won't kick the author in the teeth for editing or type O's. It's the story I care about.
That's one of the advantages of facebook. I have a lot of writers - mostly big name and/or successful ones - among my 'likes' and friends. They pay a lot more attention to what's going on in the publishing world, including ebooks. And they frequently share new writers they've heard about or read something by. I've come across quite a few new (to me) writers that way. And the ones on facebook are also much more likely to announce sales or specials, along with links to various sources.
What I wonder about the Kindle is do the self-published books pop up as much as they do on Amazon? I don't have a Kindle but I find browsing books on Amazon very frustrating because I am not looking for self-published books and they seem to take up more and more pages of offerings. I really wish they would have the self-published books in a separate section. I don't doubt that there are the occasional good self-published books but the frustration of reading or even starting to read many bad books in order to find the good ones is too much for me.
I was just trying to browse on Amazon and it made me think that while there are many people who love to shop on the internet, there are also people like me who are driven to regular bookstores because it's just too hard to separate the wheat from the chaff.
What I wonder about the Kindle is do the self-published books pop up as much as they do on Amazon?
You mean do self published books pop up as much in the Kindle store as they do when you're browsing print books on Amazon? Yes, in fact, they probably pop up more because some self published books aren't even available in print. It's so easy to publish to Kindle/ebook that some self published books are exclusively ebooks and the author doesn't even bother publishing them in print. I tend to stay away from these - how can I take a book seriously if the author won't even publish them properly?
However, you might find it easier to filter out self published books in the Kindle store because they tend to be below the $5 bracket. In print, self published books are usually more expensive because they can't produce them in cheap, mass quantities like big publishers can. But with ebooks, there is no printing or distribution costs so to entice readers, self published authors tend to price them low. Not always though and sometimes you get books from bigger publishers on sale, so it's not fail-safe, but it will drastically cut the numbers of self published books in search results.
There's also an advance search for paper books on Amazon where you can set a price range: Advanced Paper Book Search | eReaderIQ.com - but of course, the prices of self published print books aren't as low and therefore can't really be filtered out.
The other option is to use the "publisher" field of the advanced search for paper books - if you put "-CreateSpace" in the publisher field (make sure the dash is in there, as that tells it to exclude the following), that should spit out results excluding books published with CreateSpace, a popular print-on-demand company that many self publishers use. That will not remove ALL self published books, just the ones done with CreateSpace. But it should take out a big chunk of them, since Amazon own CreateSpace so it will be a popular publishing method on Amazon.
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I really wish they would have the self-published books in a separate section.
That's probably not going to happen because it wouldn't be fair to the self published authors and since Amazon make a lot of revenue from self published authors (as I mentioned, Amazon own Create Space and it's ridiculously easy to publish onto Kindle), they aren't going to risk upsetting that many of their authors.
You mean do self published books pop up as much in the Kindle store as they do when you're browsing print books on Amazon? Yes, in fact, they probably pop up more because some self published books aren't even available in print. It's so easy to publish to Kindle/ebook that some self published books are exclusively ebooks and the author doesn't even bother publishing them in print. I tend to stay away from these - how can I take a book seriously if the author won't even publish them properly?
However, you might find it easier to filter out self published books in the Kindle store because they tend to be below the $5 bracket. In print, self published books are usually more expensive because they can't produce them in cheap, mass quantities like big publishers can. But with ebooks, there is no printing or distribution costs so to entice readers, self published authors tend to price them low. Not always though and sometimes you get books from bigger publishers on sale, so it's not fail-safe, but it will drastically cut the numbers of self published books in search results.
There's also an advance search for paper books on Amazon where you can set a price range: Advanced Paper Book Search | eReaderIQ.com - but of course, the prices of self published print books aren't as low and therefore can't really be filtered out.
The other option is to use the "publisher" field of the advanced search for paper books - if you put "-CreateSpace" in the publisher field (make sure the dash is in there, as that tells it to exclude the following), that should spit out results excluding books published with CreateSpace, a popular print-on-demand company that many self publishers use. That will not remove ALL self published books, just the ones done with CreateSpace. But it should take out a big chunk of them, since Amazon own CreateSpace so it will be a popular publishing method on Amazon.
That's probably not going to happen because it wouldn't be fair to the self published authors and since Amazon make a lot of revenue from self published authors (as I mentioned, Amazon own Create Space and it's ridiculously easy to publish onto Kindle), they aren't going to risk upsetting that many of their authors.
Yes, I meant the print books on Amazon. I was intensely frustrated browsing for print books on Amazon last night because I wasn't looking for a specific book, and I had to scroll through pages and pages of self-published books. And then I wondered if on the Kindle, precisely because it is about e-books, it was even worse. I don't have a Kindle, and if that's the size of it, I'd be even less likely to get one.
Yes, I meant the print books on Amazon. I was intensely frustrated browsing for print books on Amazon last night because I wasn't looking for a specific book, and I had to scroll through pages and pages of self-published books. And then I wondered if on the Kindle, precisely because it is about e-books, it was even worse. I don't have a Kindle, and if that's the size of it, I'd be even less likely to get one.
My success in finding new authors is only slightly worse in self-published than it is from the major publishing houses. Granted the worst of the self-published stuff is truly terrible. Amazon has a great feature, though, that allows you to read a sample (generally a first chapter) of most books, so that if you are browsing and the description of the book sounds interesting, you can take a peek at it before buying. You can get a pretty good feel for the book in just one chapter.
I recently sampled a highly recommended book this way (from a major publishing house) that was a painful mish-mash of third and present tense, plus it was 2nd person POV. Glad I didn't buy it.
I live in an area that has a dearth of bookstores - good or otherwise - so often this is my only chance at browsing, and I make the most of it.
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