A few years ago, my friend introduced me to Kindle Unlimited. I’m not sure if I should thank her for that or curse her for handing me Pandora’s Box.
I love KU. A lot. I think Amazon actually loses money on me because I am definitely reading more than $12. worth of books a month. I love the convenience of it and being able to explore new authors without risking my book budget on something that’s not so great.
At the same time, it often feels like I’m at a thrift store, sifting through castoffs to find the designer handbag. I get incredibly overwhelmed by all the sponsored adds, and sometimes I fall for the splashy book cover only to be disappointed when I start the book. I really hate it when the premise sounds awesome, but the execution doesn’t match up.
The fact that someone could say that about my books keeps me up at night. Yes, I know that there is no book that will please everyone. I’m aware that there are haters who will enjoy tearing down anything I write, just because they can. I’m also aware that even after almost 20 years of doing this, working with a number of publishers, and some really awesome editors, I still have a lot of room for improvement.
I still don’t want to be the cheap-ass, cast off, disappointment. I really, really, want to be the Coach bag someone finds that brightens their day and makes them feel like the search was worthwhile. I think that’s what every author is really looking for. Someone to read the story that has been birthed into the world, through blood, sweat, and tears, and love it just as much as we do.
I will never (I hope) trash a book publicly. No matter how bad I might find it, that author worked his or her ass off to get that story out into the world. I may not talk it up, but I won’t call anyone’s baby ugly. That being said, if I ever do talk about a book publicly, you can be sure I mean what I say.
Back in the “stay home mom/part time teacher” days, I was a book reviewer. The site I worked for had a policy of not trashing books. If you couldn’t write an honest, positive review, you’d pass the book on to someone who could. The idea being that if the book was good enough to get published, there would be someone out there who found the book more to their taste. This was in the days before self-publishing when it was reasonably certain that if a book was for sale, it had gone through several rounds of editing and vetting. It didn’t mean it was necessarily great, but it would be free from most errors.
I kind of miss those days.
Admittedly, I’m an English teacher and grammar is my thing. It makes me nuts to find major grammatical errors in the first chapter. I’m not talking about misused commas, I’m talking about capitalization and tense and spelling errors. Yes, mistakes slip through, we’ve covered that, but if you’re going to pay the money for a great cover, you should also pay for an editor to catch a majority of the errors.
I may end up being a disappointment to a reader (should I actually get my books on KU at some point) but, by God, it will not be because I have a ton of grammatical errors in the first chapter. I hope whoever takes a chance on my stories will come away feeling happy and satisfied after finishing the book, but if they can’t, I hope at least they aren’t tempted to throw it across the room.
