A Solution to the Problem of Bad Books
Find People Who Care Too Much
A post on bad books got our attention the other day. On one level, it was nice to be listed among the major players in ebook distribution. But it was in the broader context of bemoaning how many “crappy books” have flooded self-publishing outlets, and so ultimately annoying.
Complaining about the quality of self-published books is not news. Five years ago Profile Books’s Andrew Franklin received press for his assertion that the majority of self-published books were “terrible — unutterable rubbish. They don’t enhance anything in the world.”
I’m not sure such a comment would warrant an article today, because for many it’s taken as given.
But for the sake of argument, let’s assume that slowing the flow of rubbish books into the world would be a good thing, and that making more good books would be better still. What makes for a rubbish book? Talent of author aside, how do bad books come to be? Knowing where the problem lies might help us combat them.
I’ve been present at the creation of some bad books over the years — some would argue that I’m personally, directly responsible for at least two — and have some thoughts about this. First, having a traditional publisher is no guarantee against rubbish books. (I’m not going to link to any book pages here but half of me really wants to.)
Second, you could spend months in the New York Public Library, researching a book about (among other things) bad books, and come to accept that rubbish books were being published in 1898, 1955, 2004, and many years in between.
So let’s not blame the technology that enables self-publishing for poor reading experiences just yet. From what I’ve seen in fifteen years of mucking about in this business, rubbish books happen for lots of reasons, none of which have anything to do with the author’s skills or intelligence:
The publisher is in a rush.*
The publisher’s staff is overworked.**
The book proposal was a great read, but said all that needed to be said on the subject, and the resulting final book is a bummer.***
And there are technical reasons for rubbish books: Ebook formatting might have gone wonky, with section breaks not appearing where they should, ditto for italics, line breaks, etc.
My point is that whether a book is a crappy or pleasant reading experience is not a function of the means of distribution, nor of the corporate structures surrounding its publication. What matters is whether the author was fortunate enough to be surrounded by fanatics along the way. The pertinent question is not whether it was traditionally published or self-published, but: How obsessive about getting every detail right were the people involved?
It sounds like a tautology — bad books result from insufficient attention to the details! Duh. But hear me out, or rather the designer Erik Spiekermann, on what a difference having “obsessives” on your team makes:
Every craft requires attention to detail. Whether you’re building a bicycle, an engine, a table, a song, a typeface or a page: the details are not the details, they make the design. Concepts don’t have to be pixel-perfect, and even the fussiest project starts with a rough sketch. But building something that will be used by other people, be they drivers, riders, readers, listeners — users everywhere, it needs to be built as well as can be. Unless you are obsessed by what you’re doing, you will not be doing it well enough….
Sometimes only the experts know the difference, but if you want to be an expert at what you’re making, you will only be happy with the result when you’ve given it everything you have. I strongly believe that the attention someone gives to what he or she makes is reflected in the end result, whether it is obvious or not. Inherent quality is part of absolute quality and without it things will appear shoddy. The users may not know why, but they always sense it.
The killer app that made it easier for traditional publishers to make better books than it was for pioneering self-publishers was simply this: they had assembled teams comprised of obsessives. Some of these people had moved far from home, leaving family hundreds and thousands of miles behind, because New York was the only place (sorry, Boston) in the country where you could care so much about books and get paid — just a little — for it.
But I won’t bore you with all that sentimentality in this post. The lovely thing is that everyone can now find those book fanatics from the comfort of their mobile phone. If you’d like to ask such a person to help you out with your manuscript, or even finished book (because good publicists and marketers are obsessives, too), you can.
Last but not least, three tips for making your first approach to a professional book obsessive, be they freelance or in-house. Consider beforehand, and be prepared to talk about:
What aspect of your book you’re least confident about. Also what aspects you’re most pleased with.
Which books already on the market that you appreciate or wish to emulate.
How frequently you want to be in touch. Are you looking for someone to just do the job and hand over the finished project, or do you hope to be in regular contact throughout?
At the moment StreetLib Market is low on Requests. The more Requests posted, the better — and the better the resulting books. There’s no obligation to hire anyone once you’ve made initial contact, so it’s truly risk-free.
And if you’ve any UI or UX suggestions, please be in touch at [email protected].
Some footnotes:
*For budgetary reasons, the publisher may have scheduled books for release before the manuscripts were edited, and sometimes before the manuscript was delivered, when no one at the publisher, including the editor, knew what shape it was in. This does not happen at every traditional publisher, or even most, but it does happen.
**Ever eaten dinner in a restaurant where a prep cook, sous chef, and two members of the wait staff did not show up for their shift? The service you get from those that did show up will not be stellar. Now imagine your night out is a book manuscript.
***As many of you know, much nonfiction in the worldwide English book market is bought by publishers on the basis of a proposal, or as movie people might call it, a “treatment” — essentially an outline and synopsis, plus sample chapters and information on the author’s marketing pull. Sometimes what sounds good in summary is rambling and tedious when elaborated in full. To misuse Gertrude Stein’s famous dictum, “there is no there there.” This is a big risk with books that are bought on the basis of a fantastic newspaper article; said article sometimes exhausts both the subject and, it turns out, people’s interest in it. When handed such a manuscript, an editor might have tried to make it work and failed. But the publisher, already heavily invested in the book regardless, and not wanting to start the ugliness of demanding advance monies back from the author, hopes for the best and plows ahead with publishing it.
