You know what they say: everyone has a novel inside them. Until recently, that claim was neither here nor there, because even if it was true, there was generally no way of getting said magnum opus published. So the dreams of millions of wannabe novelists remained sadly unfulfilled.
But then along came Amazon with its Kindle e-reader and suddenly all that changed. For it turned out that the Kindle was not just a gadget, it was also a publishing platform. Not only that, it was a platform backed by the world’s biggest online retailer. And given that ebooks do not involve the messy and expensive business of squeezing vegetable dyes on to processed wood-pulp, the costs of publishing them is negligible.
So Amazon created a self-publishing system based around the Kindle and offered it to the world. Henceforth, any Tom, Dick or Harry could write that novel/book that had lurked inside them for decades, upload it to Amazon’s publishing engine, set a price and — hey presto! — it would be made available on the Amazon site for instant purchase and download.
Save and publish
It’s as easy as falling off a log. First, you write your “book” using Microsoft Word in the usual way but avoiding bullet points, special fonts, headers, and footers, and inserting a page break at the end of every chapter. Next, save the document using Word’s “save as web page” facility. Then download a special program from Amazon which converts your document into Kindle format. Run it through Amazon’s Kindle Previewer (another free downloadable program) to check that it will look OK on the Kindle. If it looks acceptable, then upload the file to Amazon and your book will appear for sale on the Kindle store approximately 24 hours after clicking “save and publish.”
At first sight, it seems magical. At a stroke, all those tiresome gatekeepers — those self-important agents, editors and publishers who stood between you and recognition — are abolished. Suddenly, the world can see your hitherto unrecognised talent in all its glory. Isn’t technology wonderful?
Er, up to a point. This ebook technology has proved so successful that Amazon now claims to be selling more electronic publications than conventional printed ones. The company is clearly surfing a wave. According to one industry expert, for example, nearly 2.8-million non-traditional books, including ebooks, were published in the United States in 2010, while just more than 316 000 traditional books came out. That compares with 1.33-million ebooks and 302 000 printed books in 2009.
Impressive, eh? It’s only when one peruses the cornucopia of literary productions available on the Kindle store that one detects the first scent of rodent. One of the most prolific self-publishers on the site is Manuel Ortiz Braschi. When I last checked he had edited, authored or co-authored no fewer than 3 255 ebooks. Braschi is clearly a man of Herculean energy and wide learning, who ranges effortlessly from How to Become a Lethal Weapon in Two Weeks (£1.40) to Herbs 101: How to Plant, Grow & Cook with Natural Herbs (£0.70) while taking in Potty Training! The Ultimate Potty Training Guide! (£0.69).
Having inspected Mr Braschi’s The Miracle of Vinegar: 65 Tried and Tested Uses For Health and Home! (which, at £0.69, works out at about 30p per screenful of text), I can testify that he is no Delia Smith. But at least he appears to write — or at any rate compile — his own stuff. In that respect, he represents the quality end of the Kindle self-publishing business.
What seems to be happening is that Amazon’s platform is being overwhelmed by spammers who “scrape” content from websites or, in some cases, actually lift entire texts, and republish them as ebooks. And, in a neat twist, each of these ersatz “books” can be marketed under several different titles as coming from different authors. Thus a book on health insurance is available as three separate publications, priced at £2.15, £2.18 and £4.35. And an ingenious entrepreneur is marketing a training course for Kindle “authors”. “You just hand the video course to your spouse, your assistant, your brother… heck — even hand it to your 10-year-old kid! They’ll be posting 10 or even 20 new Kindle books to your account EVERY DAY!”
Kindle self-publishing, in other words, is metamorphosing into a new kind of lucrative spam. The pollution of a potentially interesting and valuable space in this way is depressing enough. But why is Amazon allowing it to go on? Could the fact that it takes a 30% slice of every transaction have anything to do with it? I only ask. – guardian.co.uk