If the author is new to me, I’ll want a sample. That’s true for print books as well.
I’ll buy it if I like the sample, but I won’t pay more than $3 or $4 for a new-to-me author.
I haven’t read through the whole thread so maybe this has already been mentioned. Whatever you do, don’t advertise on the discussion forums at Amazon. Amazon has a forum for SPA’s to advertise their books. If you post anywhere but there, it will backfire on you.
You’re completely wrong. You’re just saying you wish that traditional publishing still held total control over what people can buy and read. What a terrible idea. I have read several self-published books online that I would NEVER have gotten to read through traditional publishers, and enjoyed the heck out of them. You think I should not be allowed to have such experiences because it distracts from the importance of me reading YOUR books. All this freedom and democracy in publishing has your panties all bunched up.
Deal. It’s not your world anymore.
Now, hang on a second. I hope LavenderBlue doesn’t mind if I respond to this too, since I agree with what she said earlier.
I didn’t get the impression that she was talking about subject matter (please correct me if I’m wrong, LavenderBlue.) Evil Captor, have you looked at some of the stuff that’s available as self-published books on Amazon? Have you read through the “Look Inside” bits? Have you seen the huge number of badly written, badly spelled, badly punctuated, poorly (if at all) edited bits of utter junk that’s offered for sale? And have you looked at the number of these that have large numbers of five-star reviews because the “author” (and yeah, I do put that in quotes in some cases) has a lot of friends that he/she conned into posting them?
Yeah, self publishing is democratic, and it’s wonderful. It’s great when topics that can’t get published by mainstream publishers because they won’t touch the controversial subjects they cover are able to have a platform to be seen. I don’t give a damn what you (editorial “you”) want to write about: erotica, fetishes, hardcore porn, ultraviolence, drugs, fringy stuff all over the map–more power to you, and it’s wonderful that you can find your audience for it without having to be subject to the gatekeeping of the trade publishers.
BUT…
For <fill in deity>'s sake, LEARN TO WRITE. At least minimally. Don’t post your piece of junk that a fourth-grade English teacher would toss back for a re-do and expect anybody to pay for it. That’s all I ask. Is that really so much? I’m curious, Evil Captor: were the self-published books that you “enjoyed the heck out of” competently written? Did you enjoy them because they had unusual subject matter that is hard to find in the mainstream, or were you willing to put up with horrible mechanics, nonexistent plots, and terrible dialogue in spite of the subject matter? I’m genuinely curious about this.
Sure, I’ll be GLAD to help you in your marketing survey!
Very little. I will read them on any book I find intriguing, but I find they are almost never useful. When they are not obvious shills, they are often tangential, misinformed and misleading.
I find that $3.99 is the break point for me on fiction. Anything above that, it’s got to be something I KNOW I will like. At or below that price, I’m more willing to take a chance on a new author.
I browse/search through Amazon. I read the publisher review very carefully, looking to see if I will find it appealing. That is probably the key point for me, a well written publisher review that tells me what the book is about and which indicates that I’ll like it. If I am very interested in a book but don’t find enough useful information about it on Amazon, I will also do a Google search and find out if there is more useful information out there. This is almost never productive.
It’s my usual procedure. I like erotic fiction, not a lot of useful information available about most of them in mainstream media. Often, not a lot of useful information about them on the Web.
I’m not sure why people distinguish between “free samples” and “Amazon look inside”. Isn’t it pretty much the same thing?
The content might be–I’m not sure. But you can do the “Look Inside” online. The free sample is beamed directly to your Kindle (or Kindle app).
Price does and does not matter for me. If it is something I am taking a chance, unknown author, few reviews or similar I am not willing to pay a lot. But if it is an author I know I will enjoy (George R.R. Martin, for example) I have no qualms about spending $14.99 for a book. But these are few and far between. I fa read about an author from a respectable book review that sounds like I will like it then I may go for the $9.99 price. Online reviews are of marginal importance. More influential if the reviews are bad versus good. I upload a lot of samples, but don’t end up reading a lot of them. Many I do not get very far in. Basically, if I read the sample and I really need to know what is happening I will buy the book and the price will depend on that. Like I said I may pay up to $9.99, but usually about $5 makes me perfectly comfortable to take a chance.
The thing is, what Lavender was advocating was Amazon no longer allowing self-publishing. Encouraging self-published authors to get their work thoroughly edited is not the same thing as not allowing them to get published, which is what Lavender was advocating. Also, if you don’t like the spelling and grammar errors, you and everyone else are free to leave bad reviews or not buy the book in the first place (almost all have the look inside feature to let you see if those errors are rampant.)
The fact that badly written self-published books exists bothers me no more than the fact that very very badly written house-published books exist.
Well, I certainly don’t advocate Amazon (or anyone else) not allowing self-publishing. I think the fact that anyone can write a book and have it made available to the world is a wonderful thing, just like I think the internet is a wonderful thing where its positive aspects far outweigh the fact that there are a bunch of adolescent d-bags out there who are trying their best to ruin it for everyone else.
Be honest, though–have you ever seen a “very very badly written house published book” that’s anywhere close to as bad as the example I included in one of my previous posts in this thread? I mean, come on–everybody loves to bag on things like “Fifty Shades of Grey” and the Dan Brown books, but you have to admit, they’ve at least been edited so the proper rules of spelling, grammar, punctuation, dialog, and structure have been followed. Whether the plots suck is another matter–but when you can’t even get to the plot because you can’t slog through the mechanical errors, that’s not something you find (at least not in excess) in trade-published books.
I’ll be glad to help you out, Infovore. Two books that I enjoyed reading were the Slave Harems of Xhagia series by Teagan Rand (it’s published as four different books, but it’s clearly one long book broken up into four shorter books), and Human Commodity by Candace Smith. And yes, I bought them because I hoped they would have the same combination of interesting adventures on an exotic world and bondage and dominance sex slavery that made John Norman’s books so much fun to read, despite their flaws. But I was disappointed in both of them on the sexy counts, but liked them anyway.
In both books, I had no problems with spelling errors or grammar. Then again, I ENJOY books written in dialect, so little things like spelling errors and grammar sail right past me unless they are extremely egregious. You got problems with spelling errors, you are NOT gonna like Iain Banks’ Fearsum Enjinn.
In both books the, deciding factor that made me buy them was the plot. Slave Harems of Xhagia was about an Earth woman kidnapped by alien slavers called the Xhagians who were humanoid, in the sense that Xhagian males are taller and better looking than human males (heh). She’s picked out to be part of the Emperor of Xhagia’s harem because she’s so pretty, y’know. And she discovers, as do all the Earth girls, that the Xhagians have a secret weapon that turns the Earth women into totally sex-obsessed sluts who will put up with any amount of sex slavery just to get at that one thing that they must have: Xhagian men’s sperm. And plenty of it! Seems the stuff has a magical effect on Earth women’s psyche’s, inducing prolonged orgasms orders of magnitude more intense than ordinary orgasms on contact with ANY part of their bodies. (Does not work the same on Xhagian women.)
This sounds like a bit of convenient plotting for making sex slavery romantic (plus it turns out that most Xhagian slavers have hearts of gold) but it’s more than that. The way the sperm works turns out to be part of the over-arching story about the relationship between Xhagians and humans and other races in the galaxy that goes back to a conflict between involving a progenitor race for both species that was involved in a genocidal war that destroyed its civilization, millions of years ago, leaving them extinct.
That was what hooked me, Rand did an unusually good job of hooking the plot in with the sex slavery story. Because it wasn’t the sexy time stuff that interested me, as the main sexual fetish that was being played up here was bukkake, or more precisely, the fetishization of sperm. I have zero interest in that, but I went on and bought all four books in the series because I wanted to see how the plot worked out. I wound up skipping over the sexy interludes in the later books. I have read many, many SF books with less ingeniously conceived plots. I’m not saying Rand is on par with Iain Banks or Vernor Vinge here, far from it, but she knows how to write a story. Plus the lead character and her lover interest, a Xhagian slaver, were appealing characters, and the female lead had a secret that was hooked in with the plot, too.
I bought “Human Commodity” for the plot, too. A lot of Dopers might like it: a second economic crash has flatlined the world economy. Everywhere is in the doldrums, jobs are scarce and poverty is widespread and getting wider spreader. An evil young economist figures a way out though. He realizes that the legalization of prostitution that has gone on might be the preliminary step for a new commodities market: a market in women as slaves.
Using blackmail and backstabbing, he transforms the organization in which he works in the mailroom into a human commodities trading firm, the biggest in the world, enslaving women by contract, easy to do in an impoverished world. Feminists oppose it, but they are represented by an organization with the sadly chosen acronym of POHO and consists of half a dozen women who are so crazy that their daughters call them the OTRS for Off Their Rockers. (Another plot point I didn’t buy.)
What I had hoped for here was a wicked satire, sort of a Handmaid’s Tale with an evil, amoral corporate oligarchy taking the place of the religious theocracy and plenty of kinky, sexy sex slavery thrown in. Well, the way the book’s plot resolved was very disappointing, a feminist victory of sorts but with so much human misery involved that it kinda made no difference that the good guys won.
Plus, the kinky sex slavery was not at all fun to read, because although the slavery was sexualized, it was never eroticized, that is, there is never a halfway believable sexual relationship between any of the characters. There was dominance and submission but there were no dominants or submissives, really. Just characters who performed act B on person C. You never got the impression that anyone in the books were having any fun, except for the bad guys who were enjoying being evil. Frankly, the bukkake sex, uninteresting though the fetish is to me, in Rand’s book was more fun to read, because in it, at least, there were believable characters who enjoyed what they were doing.
I’d never buy another Candace Smith book. I’m glad I did read Human Commodity, because if I hadn’t I would have had an intolerable itching to know if it was the book I had hoped it would be.
So two books where I got sucked in by the plot and was disappointed by the sexy content. It was still great fun reading them because with ebooks, I get the feeling that anything, good or bad, might happen. I don’t get that with traditional publishing, because I know some stiff will be looking at the book’s content and saying “Can’t have that!” … and fuck that!
That help?
P.S. I have written very lengthy reviews of both books that spell things out more on my site, which is NSFW so I will spoiler box them, if you want more detail feel free to visit, but I think I’ve written things out pretty clearly here:
Xhagia review. Human Commodity review.
Very much. Thanks.
I read the Look Inside bit for the Xhagia book, and I can assure you that it doesn’t even come close to falling under what I’m talking about. Not my cup of tea subject-wise, but it’s obvious to me that the author knows how to write. That’s the kind of book that makes me really glad there are self-publishing options–the kind where there’s a market but probably not a big enough one to support a commercial print run. I’m sure there are tons of niche markets like that, and it’s great that there’s an opportunity for writers who don’t fit the mainstream to find an audience.
Again, I suggest you read the example I posted, and compare it with the Xhagia book. I think you’ll see the kind of thing I’m arguing against.
A really good cover might attract my eye, but I really don’t judge books by them. Human Commodity’s cover is almost laughably bad.
I’ll be frank: for me, price is #1. I look at the Kindle Daily Deals every day, look at their monthly deals, and check Pixel of Ink for other discounted or free books. For an unknown author, I generally will not spend more than $3. The good news is, in that under-$3 range, books are practically impulse buys. At that price, I figure, a book is cheaper than a chocolate shake, and makes me happy a lot longer.
I read samples all the time; however, you don’t have a whole lot of room to impress me in that little sample, so you better put your best foot forward. I can only think of a handful of books I’ve purchased after reading the sample.
Regarding reviews: I am immediately suspicious of self-published books with dozens of gushing, five-star ratings. In my experience, those are usually paid reviews, or the author’s friends and family. Example: My Bad Tequila. One of the worst books I’ve had the misfortune to encounter (really, get the sample, it’s unreal), yet it’s got 24 five-star reviews.
O. Kay.
Still, I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that some five-star reviews of bad books are honest reviews written by readers who are just as tone-deaf to bad writing as the authors are.
Because unanimity gives a false impression that no one dissents.
Maybe I should go easy on him. After all, didn’t Hemingway write stuff like:
“Trying to recollect the last thing I could recall.” Pure poetry.
That would make sense if the question had been: Do you like e-books?
The question was, rather, “What makes you buy an e-book?”
I forgot to mention, in addition to the publisher review, I also read the “Look Inside” sample very carefully. Those two elements combined are my chief tools in deciding whether or not to buy a book. Frex, I recently bought a book that had a neutral sounding plot, and a bad user review, but the Look Inside sold me on it, and it’s MUCH better than the publisher review would have indicated, even though the bad user review had a point.
On the other hand, I don’t believe that the publisher review or the Look Inside section of “Xhagia” indicated that its sexy element was mostly bukkake.