J.W. Tapper's Blog
January 29, 2018
Self-publishing is killing self-publishing
Self-publishing. It’s being ruined by the very people who should be supporting it and doing everything in their power to make it great. I’m talking about all the self-published authors who are happy to release books littered with bad grammar, poor punctuation, clichés, repetition, clunky sentences and a total lack of any sign that proofreading or editing has taken place.
Their books get slammed by reviewers on Amazon, Goodreads, etc., and the widespread negativity towards all self-published books, not just the legitimately bad ones, grows exponentially.
Nobody ever posts a review on Amazon to compliment an author on good spelling or punctuation because those things are expected, and should be taken for granted by a reader. Because of that, those things should be prioritised by self-published authors, not forgotten or ignored.
No reader wants to have to struggle with interpreting the meaning of a sentence because it is poorly written. Just think about that for a few seconds. Now go pick a self-published book at random on Amazon and check out the ‘Look Inside’ sample. If that sample is a load of unedited garbage, the whole book is guaranteed to be.
No reader wants their immersion in a book to be derailed by bad punctuation, missing words (or duplicated words), and the countless other mistakes that too many self-published authors don’t even bother trying to correct before rushing their novel out into the world.
The attitude is obvious: they have written their book and they want it published NOW. It took them six months, or six years, or a whole weekend to write, so they believe that they have done all the hard work and now they want the reward to which they are entitled: they want to see their book published and for sale.
If you venture onto a Facebook author group or some other forum where self-published authors congregate to help each other decide which badly Photoshopped cover to use, or which stilted, purple-prose blurb to choose, you must never, ever tell any of them that the books they have published need a bit of editing as they’re not in a fit state to have been published. Try this, and you will be either ignored or lambasted as some kind of fascist killjoy who lives only to belittle the stalwart efforts of the self-published community.
Sorry, but every unedited, mistake-laden self-published book that gets released contributes to the growing negative attitude of readers to self-published books. That’s a fact. I don’t care if it’s not a popular fact, it’s still a fact. There are lots of potential readers out there who will never go near one of my self-published books because they have already suffered too much at the hands of impatient self-published authors who were only interested in writing something and publishing it, and not at all interested in writing something, checking it, asking one or two other people to check it, and doing everything they could possibly do to make it the best that it could be.
It’s your book. You wrote it. You have to care about it being genuinely ready for publication, because nobody else will.
I’m not talking about boring stories, copy-paste characters, illogical plots, or sub-literate rambling bollocks masquerading as science fiction. I’m talking about actually caring about the quality of your finished product at a fundamental level. Because a hell of a lot of you clearly don’t care, and don’t want to hear about it from your peers.
“I sell plenty of books,” is one of their standard, brush-off replies when told that their books need to be proofread and edited before publication. Yes, I’m sure you do sell books. But then the people who bought your books will read them, see that you can’t even string a coherent sentence together, or understand the basics of punctuation, and the self-publishing negativity grows a little bit more.
I probably put more effort into checking and editing this rant than a lot of self-published authors put into editing and proofreading their own books.
I certainly put a hell of a lot more effort into editing and proofreading my own books.
And yet, some mistakes do slip through. I accept that, and I’m more than happy to not only admit it, but to applaud and thank anyone who spots something wrong in one of my books and lets me know about it. If I missed it, and my test-readers missed it, then whoever finds these mistakes deserves that applause and thanks.
If you’re a self-published author and you put as much effort, or more, into editing as you put into writing your books, then you have my gratitude and my congratulations. All you need to worry about are the same things I’m ranting about in this post.
If you’re a self-published author, and you read this post and thought ,”Ah, screw him, he thinks he’s some sort of grand-master punctuation expert who can lecture me on how I write…” I think we all know what I think of you and your rushed, ill-considered publications.
Have a great day. Do some editing. It won’t kill you.
Their books get slammed by reviewers on Amazon, Goodreads, etc., and the widespread negativity towards all self-published books, not just the legitimately bad ones, grows exponentially.
Nobody ever posts a review on Amazon to compliment an author on good spelling or punctuation because those things are expected, and should be taken for granted by a reader. Because of that, those things should be prioritised by self-published authors, not forgotten or ignored.
No reader wants to have to struggle with interpreting the meaning of a sentence because it is poorly written. Just think about that for a few seconds. Now go pick a self-published book at random on Amazon and check out the ‘Look Inside’ sample. If that sample is a load of unedited garbage, the whole book is guaranteed to be.
No reader wants their immersion in a book to be derailed by bad punctuation, missing words (or duplicated words), and the countless other mistakes that too many self-published authors don’t even bother trying to correct before rushing their novel out into the world.
The attitude is obvious: they have written their book and they want it published NOW. It took them six months, or six years, or a whole weekend to write, so they believe that they have done all the hard work and now they want the reward to which they are entitled: they want to see their book published and for sale.
If you venture onto a Facebook author group or some other forum where self-published authors congregate to help each other decide which badly Photoshopped cover to use, or which stilted, purple-prose blurb to choose, you must never, ever tell any of them that the books they have published need a bit of editing as they’re not in a fit state to have been published. Try this, and you will be either ignored or lambasted as some kind of fascist killjoy who lives only to belittle the stalwart efforts of the self-published community.
Sorry, but every unedited, mistake-laden self-published book that gets released contributes to the growing negative attitude of readers to self-published books. That’s a fact. I don’t care if it’s not a popular fact, it’s still a fact. There are lots of potential readers out there who will never go near one of my self-published books because they have already suffered too much at the hands of impatient self-published authors who were only interested in writing something and publishing it, and not at all interested in writing something, checking it, asking one or two other people to check it, and doing everything they could possibly do to make it the best that it could be.
It’s your book. You wrote it. You have to care about it being genuinely ready for publication, because nobody else will.
I’m not talking about boring stories, copy-paste characters, illogical plots, or sub-literate rambling bollocks masquerading as science fiction. I’m talking about actually caring about the quality of your finished product at a fundamental level. Because a hell of a lot of you clearly don’t care, and don’t want to hear about it from your peers.
“I sell plenty of books,” is one of their standard, brush-off replies when told that their books need to be proofread and edited before publication. Yes, I’m sure you do sell books. But then the people who bought your books will read them, see that you can’t even string a coherent sentence together, or understand the basics of punctuation, and the self-publishing negativity grows a little bit more.
I probably put more effort into checking and editing this rant than a lot of self-published authors put into editing and proofreading their own books.
I certainly put a hell of a lot more effort into editing and proofreading my own books.
And yet, some mistakes do slip through. I accept that, and I’m more than happy to not only admit it, but to applaud and thank anyone who spots something wrong in one of my books and lets me know about it. If I missed it, and my test-readers missed it, then whoever finds these mistakes deserves that applause and thanks.
If you’re a self-published author and you put as much effort, or more, into editing as you put into writing your books, then you have my gratitude and my congratulations. All you need to worry about are the same things I’m ranting about in this post.
If you’re a self-published author, and you read this post and thought ,”Ah, screw him, he thinks he’s some sort of grand-master punctuation expert who can lecture me on how I write…” I think we all know what I think of you and your rushed, ill-considered publications.
Have a great day. Do some editing. It won’t kill you.
April 27, 2015
How I write (Part 1)
This is a slightly edited version of a blog post from my own website on the subject of how I write novels.
I don’t force myself to write; I write for enjoyment.
I generally write during a short (1-2 hours) period in the evening, every day, between 20:45 and 22:15. This is through necessity, not choice. I would write for longer if I had the time. On a good day, I can produce over 1000 words in under 2 hours, but it’s usually not that many.
Technical stuff: I write in Word 2007 on a desktop PC. I used Notepad to write plans, outlines, character bios, and other background notes. I regularly convert my work-in-progress Word documents into mobi files and transfer them to my phone or tablet so that I can do some proof-reading and editing as and when I get time while I’m out of the house.
I use a mechanical keyboard, specifically a Das Model S Professional. I don’t know exactly how many first-draft typos it has prevented, or how much it has actually improved my typing speed, but it looks great and it is just excellent to work on.
I plan books before I write them. I also plan individual scenes and choreograph the details of sequences where that sort of thing is necessary or useful.
I spend a lot of time naming characters, then I get people telling me I named a character after them or someone they know. I didn’t do this. Or, if I did, it wasn’t you or anyone that you know. Just so we’re crystal clear on that. Again.
I write each book as a single Word document. The first full length book I wrote, I created individual documents for each chapter. Terrible idea. It makes everything much more complicated and tiresome than it needs to be, particularly if you want to search for a particular word, or rename a character.
There are thousands of tips on how to write, in hundreds of books and even more websites. Some of the tips are very good, some of them don’t apply too readily to the way that I work.
For example, everyone seems to have a tip for breaking through “writer’s block”. I don’t get it. I actually don’t get writer’s block, whatever that is. Maybe it’s because I only have an hour or so each evening, and I’m constantly excited about filling that small window of opportunity with creativity and entertainment. Perhaps I’m just lucky, although that’s a bit of a stretch.
Another tip that I don’t agree with is to write your novel in a random order, maybe starting with a scene that you really want to write that happens near the end, or in the middle. I can’t see how that can be anything but utterly counter-productive, and it makes me wonder if that is the cause of all these people with writer’s block. It seems fairly obvious to me that if I planned out a novel, identified half a dozen really exciting scenes and wrote them first, the rest of the novel would end up feeling like a chore to write, filling in lengthy gaps between the few scenes that were actually fun to write.
I start at the beginning and write the whole novel in the sequence it’s going to be read. I look forward to writing the fun scenes, and I plan them before writing them, but I also enjoy writing the book as a whole. If I don’t enjoy writing the whole thing, how can I expect anyone to enjoy reading it?
I’ll list a few tips that I consider essential:
Get the grammar, spelling and punctuation right. You’re not James Joyce and I’m not Cormac McCarthy. If the first page of a Kindle sample of one of my books is full of spelling mistakes, grammatical foul-ups, and poor punctuation, I’m not going to assume anyone will be interested in reading more.
I’ll fully credit this next one to Elmore Leonard, as he says it most succinctly when listing his ten rules for writing novels: “Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.” If you create strong scenes and give your characters good dialogue, you don’t need anything else. And don’t use adverbs to modify “said”.
No clichés. And I mean clichéd situations as well as using worn-out phrases. If any slip through the cracks in my first draft, I strip them out with extreme prejudice during the editing phases. While you’re busy eliminating clichés, take out any uses of the word “suddenly” and rewrite the sentences so that the suddenness is apparent without the word.
Don’t describe characters, places, or objects in extreme detail. I’ve been guilty of doing this, but I’m working on it.
Mirrors. Don’t have a character look into a mirror as a mechanism for describing that character, particularly when writing first-person. I looked at my reflection and checked that my hooded eyes, chiselled jaw and jet black hair complemented the neatly pressed shirt and grey Armani suit that I was wearing for the annual Billionaires’ Ball. That sort of thing. It’s everywhere.
Read it all aloud. The whole thing. This will highlight clunky sentences, overused words and bits where it just doesn’t work. It is really useful and should not be avoided.
Edit with a chainsaw. If you can’t afford to pay an editor, do it yourself and be absolutely brutal. I look forward to editing my own writing, almost as if it was written by someone I don’t particularly like and I go in wanting to find lots to change, rewrite completely or just rip out and throw away. I’ve got a document called “Deleted parts of Kissing The Scorpion” that is over 6000 words. Those are just the parts I ripped out; I changed a lot more. Subsequent books have required less wholesale butchery because I am learning as I go and not repeating my mistakes. In theory.
Get someone (more people if possible) who will give you honest, useful criticism and feedback, to proof-read or test-read your books. It’s invaluable.
I don’t force myself to write; I write for enjoyment.
I generally write during a short (1-2 hours) period in the evening, every day, between 20:45 and 22:15. This is through necessity, not choice. I would write for longer if I had the time. On a good day, I can produce over 1000 words in under 2 hours, but it’s usually not that many.
Technical stuff: I write in Word 2007 on a desktop PC. I used Notepad to write plans, outlines, character bios, and other background notes. I regularly convert my work-in-progress Word documents into mobi files and transfer them to my phone or tablet so that I can do some proof-reading and editing as and when I get time while I’m out of the house.
I use a mechanical keyboard, specifically a Das Model S Professional. I don’t know exactly how many first-draft typos it has prevented, or how much it has actually improved my typing speed, but it looks great and it is just excellent to work on.
I plan books before I write them. I also plan individual scenes and choreograph the details of sequences where that sort of thing is necessary or useful.
I spend a lot of time naming characters, then I get people telling me I named a character after them or someone they know. I didn’t do this. Or, if I did, it wasn’t you or anyone that you know. Just so we’re crystal clear on that. Again.
I write each book as a single Word document. The first full length book I wrote, I created individual documents for each chapter. Terrible idea. It makes everything much more complicated and tiresome than it needs to be, particularly if you want to search for a particular word, or rename a character.
There are thousands of tips on how to write, in hundreds of books and even more websites. Some of the tips are very good, some of them don’t apply too readily to the way that I work.
For example, everyone seems to have a tip for breaking through “writer’s block”. I don’t get it. I actually don’t get writer’s block, whatever that is. Maybe it’s because I only have an hour or so each evening, and I’m constantly excited about filling that small window of opportunity with creativity and entertainment. Perhaps I’m just lucky, although that’s a bit of a stretch.
Another tip that I don’t agree with is to write your novel in a random order, maybe starting with a scene that you really want to write that happens near the end, or in the middle. I can’t see how that can be anything but utterly counter-productive, and it makes me wonder if that is the cause of all these people with writer’s block. It seems fairly obvious to me that if I planned out a novel, identified half a dozen really exciting scenes and wrote them first, the rest of the novel would end up feeling like a chore to write, filling in lengthy gaps between the few scenes that were actually fun to write.
I start at the beginning and write the whole novel in the sequence it’s going to be read. I look forward to writing the fun scenes, and I plan them before writing them, but I also enjoy writing the book as a whole. If I don’t enjoy writing the whole thing, how can I expect anyone to enjoy reading it?
I’ll list a few tips that I consider essential:
Get the grammar, spelling and punctuation right. You’re not James Joyce and I’m not Cormac McCarthy. If the first page of a Kindle sample of one of my books is full of spelling mistakes, grammatical foul-ups, and poor punctuation, I’m not going to assume anyone will be interested in reading more.
I’ll fully credit this next one to Elmore Leonard, as he says it most succinctly when listing his ten rules for writing novels: “Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.” If you create strong scenes and give your characters good dialogue, you don’t need anything else. And don’t use adverbs to modify “said”.
No clichés. And I mean clichéd situations as well as using worn-out phrases. If any slip through the cracks in my first draft, I strip them out with extreme prejudice during the editing phases. While you’re busy eliminating clichés, take out any uses of the word “suddenly” and rewrite the sentences so that the suddenness is apparent without the word.
Don’t describe characters, places, or objects in extreme detail. I’ve been guilty of doing this, but I’m working on it.
Mirrors. Don’t have a character look into a mirror as a mechanism for describing that character, particularly when writing first-person. I looked at my reflection and checked that my hooded eyes, chiselled jaw and jet black hair complemented the neatly pressed shirt and grey Armani suit that I was wearing for the annual Billionaires’ Ball. That sort of thing. It’s everywhere.
Read it all aloud. The whole thing. This will highlight clunky sentences, overused words and bits where it just doesn’t work. It is really useful and should not be avoided.
Edit with a chainsaw. If you can’t afford to pay an editor, do it yourself and be absolutely brutal. I look forward to editing my own writing, almost as if it was written by someone I don’t particularly like and I go in wanting to find lots to change, rewrite completely or just rip out and throw away. I’ve got a document called “Deleted parts of Kissing The Scorpion” that is over 6000 words. Those are just the parts I ripped out; I changed a lot more. Subsequent books have required less wholesale butchery because I am learning as I go and not repeating my mistakes. In theory.
Get someone (more people if possible) who will give you honest, useful criticism and feedback, to proof-read or test-read your books. It’s invaluable.
