Monday, August 6, 2012

Higher standards

Recently, I went onto the Amazon discussion boards. Many readers are upset about the fact that lots of Ebooks are being published with a lot of errors. While I would like to say that this is not the case, I must admit that it is the case. While not all Ebooks are riddled with grammatical errors, lots of them are. I was under the impression that this was getting better but I am not so rue anymore. I went to Barnes and Noble recently and read some books via my Nook (yes, that is a cool feature that Barnes and Noble has provided its customers..eat your heart out Kindle, ha ha). It was disheartening to see how many Ebooks has mistakes in them. Many of these mistakes were so obvious that I am led to believe that the person did not even use the 'spell check' feature before converting and publishing their work.

I am not the grammar police. I commit many structural sins with regard to sentences. However, one of the easiest things to correct is spelling. I am not saying that Authors should be perfect with no flaws. However, I am saying that we need to be more mindful of what we publish. You do not need editors to find the errors that I found. We have to hold ourselves to higher standards. Just because it is easy to publish an Ebook doesn't mean that we should throw caution to the wind. Our readers are looking at us very closely and they do not like what they see.

2 comments:

  1. I totally agree on this one. I want to enjoy more indie/self-pubbed books, and I want the stigma of self-pubbing to go away, but there are so many e-books out there that clearly did not see a revision. If authors want to change the reputation of self-publishing, we have to be willing to take up the huge task of revising and editing on our own.

    Old GFC follower passing through. My blog is nickieanderson.blogspot.com

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    1. Thanks for your input. I will swing by your blog. Come back soon :-)

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