Are You Kidding Me?

I read an e-book sample tonight and while the characters and plot were entertaining, there were so many mistakes that I was continually jerked out of my enjoyment zone.

It was messy, as Rage would say.

Now I make mistakes. Everyone does. I have finally learned to pay attention to those red underlines MSWord points out my misspellings with. Yet I still make mistakes and will very likely continue doing so.

But from paper to computer, through re-writes, re-reads, beta readers and a trip to my lovely Story Tamer, I do my best to weed out those mistakes in order to present the best story possible when I publish a title for sale.

When I read something like that, it appears to me that the author doesn’t care. That he/she is just cranking the stories out as quickly as possible in order to make a buck.

This chaps my ass, people, because it gives indie authors a bad rap.

My feeling of ‘doesn’t care’ turned into ‘are you kidding me?’ when I visited the author’s website.

It was one of those pages that never ends, complete with loads of graphics, huge text and basically looked like something a newcomer to the internets would create using AOL’s free ’site building’ software.

But the real kick in the pants? This author’s titles are listed everywhere and there were several good reviews of them displayed.

Are you serious? Really?

As a writer, you come across a lot of blogs and web sites that emphasize how important writing well and presenting your work as professionally as you are capable of is.

All the writers I know strive to do just that. We work on things like not using certain words over and over again, proper punctuation, correct spelling, etc.

We want to present an enjoyable read that doesn’t have anything which will jar the reader out of their suspension of disbelief or warm, fuzzy reading place.

After seeing that, I have to ask: are we doing it all wrong?

Would we sell more if we were sloppy about all of that?

Color my mind blown, people.

I’m obviously going to have to stay away from e-book samples for a while. My inner critic needs both recovery time and to be reminded to focus only on my writing efforts, unless asked for her opinion.

Heading back to my corner now, but…

Are you kidding me?

Sheesh, maybe I don’t want that Sony eReader for Christmas after all.

Author’s Note: It’s late, maybe I’m overly critical. Maybe I should just keep working at honing my own writing skills and not worry about what others are doing. But really, knowing how hard the indie authors I know try to polish their works, something like that is way irritating.