Let me lower myself into the reviewing pit...
Dear Lord, this rope is slippery. Oooh, and it smells of poo down here… I dislike Amazon for its predatory ways (though I have a Kindle and buy
old-fashioned books and novellas there: yes, I'm a hypocrite...). In recent
years I've acquired a novella reading habit. I think with these shorter works
authors can be experimental and still keep the quality very high across the
whole piece. It's nice to see what a good author can do with a bit of freedom
and the stories are widely available without you having to subscribe to every
magazine going. If it weren’t for the Kindle I’d never have the chance to read all
those delicious novellas, particularly of the SF kind. I wish Muhammad N.
Sikandar well, though I'm not in his target audience and am unlikely to read
more of his books. I don’t believe for a minute it’s possible to publish
without writing a single word as Sikandar claims. When someone already has a
large number of texts already written it’s a different case altogether.
Probably Sikandar is filthy rich and is laughing all the way to the bank. On
top of that, he’s writing for a very large potential audience, and in a genre
that is currently probably the most popular - and therefore the most lucrative
- in non-fiction: self-help books and cooking…We all need help once in a while
and we also have to eat. What can I say? Sikandar has the skills to perform all aspects
of the task of bringing his books to the customer himself, but at the end of
the day he must write!!! I’m also quite flabbergasted he is able to write new
books at a speed that others will struggle to match. Alas, I’m not superman,
not even wonder-woman. How does he do it? After all is said and done, this is
only possible because Amazon made Sikandar's success possible. But Sikandar is only a tiny outlier. There are
enormous numbers of self-published authors on Amazon, and most of them sell
pretty much nothing and make pretty much nothing. Successes in self-publishing
are tiny compared to successes in traditional publishing. I'm not against
self-publishing. I’ve done it myself. But I only managed that by writing lots
of words...I think it's a great option for many people and many books. But too
much is made of the very, very few successes, and too little is mentioned about
the vast majority who don't ever come near to making what a newbie author would
through traditional publishing. What I especially like about the Kindle is that
it’s democratic. I’ve no longer to be bound by the nepotistic, backscratching
and incestuous literary establishment but can go out and find talented authors
for themselves. That’s why I bought myself a Kindle in 2009. It strikes me that
the market will take over as the gatekeepers - books that the mass market
decide are crap won't sell beyond the first few hundred or so, as there are
customer reviews in most e-book stores. All hail crowd-sourcing. I've read
plenty of dead tree books that may have been edited but should never have seen
the light of day. Until the advent of smartphones you couldn't easily get other
readers reviews whilst browsing in your local bookstore, so when buying a book
by an unfamiliar author you were always taking a chance. And once an author
does get established often their publishers will let them publish any crap they
like (e.g., Tom Clancy, Lee Child).
SF =
Speculative Fiction.
