I really do not mind this in a sense. Finally authors are starting to get back some of their rights, and it is pretty hard to publish at a publishing house these days. At any rate, authors have been complaining about ripoff publishing houses forever. Amazon does give authors 30% royalties on book sales. The thing is that Amazon and self-publishing is threatening to put mainstream publishers out of business. A lot of people are celebrating this as publishers are widely hated by authors, but there is a downside.
First of all, I have read many self-published books. With few exceptions, they looked like crap. The layout is usually bad when it it not horrible, reprinted photographs are of horrifyingly bad quality for some reason, they are full of errors in need of an editor or a proofreader, and they are organized chaotically.
Even the paper on the covers and the pages looks cheap and the typesetting often seems off. And the fonts seem to suck too for some reason. I do not understand why any of this is true but apparently the whole process is done on the ultra-cheap. The books also give off the impression that they were printed by a computer somehow, which quite possibly they were. For whatever reason, books from publishing houses do not look like this or give off this impression.
Authors do not know layout and design so their books like they were designed by small children. They don’t know fonts or typesetting either.
Publishers know and excel at all of these things. So ebooks have been great for writers and maybe for readers by exposing us to a lot of new talent, but quality has plummeted.
I have tried to complain about this to some authors but they will not hear of it. Their books look wonderful. Period.
Suffice to say that if these folks had published with a real publisher their book would not look like crap. I have read recent books printed by publishers, even small publishers, and they all looked extremely professional.
The publishing houses are retaliating by trying to set up a model whereby authors can get 40-50% of royalties on their books. I am not sure how this is going to work but that may be the only way they can survive the competition by Amazon.
