I’ll soon be posting free, downloadable electronic versions of all my novels on this site. In advance of that, here’s a comment I wrote on indie author/publisher Zoe Winter‘s website (which I copyedited here, ’cause I can’t help myself).
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I recently discovered that one of my novels had been bundled with a couple of others and made available for download as a bittorrent file.
Three things:
1) Quality control.
Which version are they sending out? I’ve made corrections to my books, and have recently been going back to try and keep the formatting in the e-book versions.
I submitted my books to a number of sites years ago that did their own conversions, and the prevalent thinking about e-books is “It’s all raw text!”, which isn’t true, completely ignores the informational aspect of typesetting (e.g. I use italics to denote internal monologue — lost in this type of conversion), and conversion often gets line-breaks wrong.
So the end result looks a mess — and since the biggest criticism of indie work is quality control, I wish I could ensure that people got the best version of the book.
I want to share my book through Smashwords, ’cause it’s the biggest and best model for e-book distribution going, but they insist that you convert your book through their site, and when I’ve tried with my books (in a variety of formats) it’s done a very, very bad job of it. So I’m not publishing through them until they fix that.
2) Torrents feel dirty.
Generally, we use torrents online to get content we’re not supposed to have. So having my content distributed that way just feels like having it stolen, even though I’m willing to give it away. I suppose people swap e-books back and forth, which is great, but torrents seem to commodify it.
3) What’s it for?
I’m not sure what my intention is in providing e-books anyway. I don’t write or publish for the money, but it does feel a bit weird to see the stats on my books and see that, wow, neat!, they’ve been downloaded thousands of times from various websites. But”¦ then what?
I’m not looking for approval or validation or love or any of that. I have that in my life. I’m happy to write stories in a vacuum, but sharing them with others, knowing they’ve occupied that imaginative space with you, is really rewarding.
Except it doesn’t translate into any kind of social or financial capital I can do anything with. I hear good things from the people who buy and read physical copies of my books, and they spread the word to others. This e-business, though — I can’t tell if it does anything.
Then there’s the career aspect: As authors we’re constantly being exhorted to do more, pitch and market ourselves, get bigger (usually without any discussion whatsoever about what we’re meant to do with this new-found bigness). There’s an unspoken implication that writers are all supposed to be very driven, ambitious, even aggressive entrepreneurs, too, and that we all, of course, want one thing. But nobody names it, because “rich and famous” is ugly, infantile, and embarrassing.
As with so many domains in life, it seems the only measures people understand as “success” are celebrity, numbers, and money. That’s not what writing is about — not when you’re in the moment of doing it or reading it — yet it’s how we assess it.
I’ve recently bought Jeff Vandermeer’s book, Booklife, which I believe explores these questions. I’ll be interested to see where that line of questioning leads me.
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