Get the free e-book "How to Make Your Book Look Rubbish" here: www.sunmakers.co.uk
Most self-published books are rubbish. Or at least they look like rubbish. By rubbish I mean garbage, trash, litter, junk, waste. Let’s take it further: excrement.
Some self-published books might have some good content in. They might. But who cares? They look like pap. Let’s face it. If the author couldn’t be bothered to package the content properly, what level of care do we assume went into the information contained within. Would you look forward to enjoying a sandwich if it was wrapped in toilet paper? You’d assume, quite rightly that there was a risk that the food was less than palatable, perhaps even poisonous. We judge a book by it’s cover too. And quite rightly so.
If you’ve ever bought an Apple product you know they have spent an awful lot of time and effort on making the unboxing of it a wonderful experience. The author of that cruddy looking self-published book didn’t give two hoots about your reading experience. All they cared about was their own content. How selfish is that?
They used to make me laugh. Now they make me sick. Here’s why.
Producing a cruddy book is selfish and arrogant. It’s as if the pig ignorant author is so haughty that they believe you should perceive them as an expert based on such flimsy evidence. It’s like they just couldn’t be bothered. But they would probably expect you to pay them extortionate fees for their consultant service or whatever new-media snake oil they’re flogging. Now they’re offering you something that’s going to lower the tone of your bookshelf.
It’s also selfish to the rest of us who really want to use self-publishing to deliver our excellent books to our audiences. The self-obsessed cheapskates are ruining the marketplace for us. Sooner or later, when people who hear your book was self-published may assume it’s total tut before they’ve even seen it.
This is why your books and products must not look like they are self-published. It’s not hard. You wouldn’t go to a business meeting dressed in a previously used big bag, so why send your expertise out in one?
Get the free e-book ‘How to Make Your Book Look Rubbish‘ here: www.sunmakers.co.uk
Book Ayd to speak at your event.
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Er, Ayd, I appreciate the theme, but a) not all self-published books look like shit, and not all mainstream publishers produce good-looking books. They might consider the form, but sometimes they forget the function. How many paperbacks are given so little gutter that you have to break the book’s spine to read it? How many paperbacks are set in such an inappropriate typeface that only the hawk-eyed can read it easily? How many books are given a professional cover that utterly misleads the buying public? Too many, is the answer. Granted, self-published books fall into several categories, the largest being professional and amateur – ie those produced by people who know how to produce a book – both content and design – and those without experience of one or both. And yes, I agree entirely that rubbishy-looking books do no-one any favours, especially the author; I’d recommend wholeheartedly that amateur self-publishers invest in a designer who understands the psychology of book-buying and the many sub-genres there are now in the market both for fiction and non-fiction: hard copy or ebook format.
And then there’s the subject of cost, which not all self-pub authors can afford after forking out the dough for all the printing, marketing, etc. And whether or not the people hired to do artwork/layout for the cover know what they’re doing. And whether or not the publishers (in POD arena) charge massive fees for every little tweak that you request they make (and that they should never have biffed in the first place). And the fact that sometimes something looks brilliant on a small graphic and/or a full-size painting, but then doesn’t translate to a book cover well.
But that said, I KNOW I need to re-do the cover of my book. Reviews for the story content on and offline have been very nice–especially considering that they were written by complete strangers for the most part–so I shall assume it isn’t total crap. But the cover won’t sell it to you. It really was more of a good illustration to go somewhere inside the book….