Thursday 19 August 2010

Why I intend to go Indie

On the cover of the third book in the Sword of Truth series there is clearly a dragon. Which doesn't seem that odd (it is a fantasy after all) until you consider that there is no dragon in Blood of the Fold. Yes, the first two books have dragons in them, but the third is curiously dragon free.

On the very first page of Dragon's Keeper by Robin Hodd there are 3 mistakes. We are supposed to believe that in a self-pubbed book these are spelling mistakes. In a publisher produced book these would be called “printing errors.”

A cookbook this year had a recipe that required “ground black people.”

A Terry Pratchett novel had the entire middle of the story reprinted and tucked in instead of the end.

There is every chance that going indie will lead to monumental fuck-ups on my part.

But they will be my fuck-ups. Not someone else's. Mine.

And that's important to me.

2 comments:

  1. Cool! FYI I've kind of given up on a lot of publisher-produced books. I stick to the things I enjoy, like classic books, lol.

    The good part (about running into problems as an indie) is that it'll be relatively uncomplicated to sort out, due to the fact that it's mainly your limitations at any one point to deal with, not 3-10 other people's [who will prettily term their shortcomings as something else / ROFL @ "spelling errors" versus "printing errors"--I didn't know a printer (the machine) could spell-check].

    Excusez-moi if that was a bit convulated, I mean, convoluted.

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  2. Yeah, and the thing is, ten years ago I never saw errors in trad pubbed books. It almost seems like its became too expensive to do a test printing or something.

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