Here’s an empty calorie for the blog: the idea of
“congratulations” in the self-publishing world.
I’m not aiming to demean myself, but when I tell people I’m
close to putting an indie novella online and they congratulate me, I get a
guilt complex.
Self-publishing is not praiseworthy.
I could copy-and paste this sentence for one hundred
pages and upload it to Amazon and charge you $2.99 for the pleasure of reading
it. People write the roughest of drafts and throw these stories up for public
consumption.
For better and worse, there is no quality control on
Amazon.
“Well sure,” you might say, “but come on… you’ve written
a book! That’s something in and of itself!”
The reality is that anyone, with very little effort, can write
a book.
Writing is not the difficult part.
It’s writing well
that’s the challenge.
And unless you’re a wunderkind, which you likely aren’t,
(amateur mistake: assuming you
are)
(younger me: guilty)
your initial writing won’t be good. This is nothing new.
Almost every author stresses how rough drafts cannot be trusted. You must revise.
You must distance yourself from the work to be able to read it with fresh,
critical eyes and then revise some more. And the cycle repeats. This is a major
time commitment in the writing process: performing corrective surgery on what
is guaranteed to be a flawed creation. Trimming fat. Stitching up scenes. Hiding
those stitches. Remodeling characters. Reconstructing dialogue. Figuring out
the most engaging way to form a sentence/paragraph/action sequence.
Many self-published authors do not take these steps. They’re
too enamored with their writing to realize this thing they birthed needs to go
to the hospital. The idea of editing (if it exists) is a quick proof-read. And online
the story goes. Available for all to download.
End point being, anyone can create and upload content.
