Rage against indie writers

by

Stella Deleuze

One bigmouth with an even bigger rage against Indies

I love a good poke. Did it work? Please say yes, because that would make me happy. Relax, I'm only kidding. But I meant it when I said I have a rage against Indies. Just to clarify, it's not all of them, that would be stupid; after all I'm self-published, too, but many of them. Why? Well, you may want to sit down and pour yourself a chamomile tea, just to be on the safe side; I don't want you to fall off your chair or hurt yourself jumping up in order to throttle me.

Amazon.com
Amazon.UK

Sitting comfortably? Good. Now, listen, I'm not a bitch. Okay, maybe I am, but only a bit. What are you on about? you wonder. Well, let's put it this way: I've probably made a few enemies by publishing my massive rant about self-published authors. Not because I hate them so much, but because I hate what they're doing, or not doing. The trigger for my writing Rage Against The Indie in the first place was that I experienced something I've never experienced before: deleting book, after book, after book on my Kindle. Self-published books, that is. And as you can imagine, I wasn't a happy camper. You see, I only read thirty to fifty minutes in bed, just before I close my eyes and drift off into wonderful dreams. I've counted on a few occasions: I read about ten pages of a normal paperback in an hour. That's roughly 3000 words. I know, very slow, but I'm thorough and read every single word. 

That's probably one reason for my being so picky about what I read, the other two hundred and fifty-seven reasons are that I'm an editor and know a thing or two about writing. Once you gain access to that knowledge, there's no way back; you can't flick a switch and . . .  boom . . . be a pure reader again. It's impossible, and that means you have some sort of expectations. Don't get me wrong. I love my light, easy-to-read chick lit, and I also like young adult fiction, nothing fancy. Something nice to relax to, but light and easy doesn't mean it needs to lack quality. Even chick lit fares better if the characters are well developed and the author knows how to craft a decent story. I hate to see a good premise being destroyed by awful and repetitive writing. Good storytellers aren't necessarily good writers, but at least they have the basics: a good story to start with. Some might blossom into decent writers, some won't.

And then you have people who think they're good storytellers, or writers, but aren't. Those who go and invent the most hideous, far-fetched, and unbelievable stories, broadly announcing they're sure they've written a bestseller, no, even worse: they're convinced. And because they get rejection after rejection, they want to prove to the world that they're worth it, that their writing is brilliant, mostly without success.

I personally lost count on how many books I've deleted. Most of the authors were too lazy to learn the basic skills a writer needs to know: character and story-development, show/tell, natural sounding dialogue, plus the attributes (punctuation and tags), apostrophes, etc.