…The friends and family of an aggrieved self-publisher have showed up in the comments to this post and are ever-so-patiently telling me that I am a rude bully, with an overtone of “check your privilege” to everything. You might be amused.
…The friends and family of an aggrieved self-publisher have showed up in the comments to this post and are ever-so-patiently telling me that I am a rude bully, with an overtone of “check your privilege” to everything. You might be amused.
FWIW, I did. As an indie book reviewer, I want the quality of self-published books to improve. While my primary concern is the writing, the first thing every potential reader sees is the cover. As a rule, we don’t look at the covers of the books we receive until after we’ve made a decision on the writing as all too often it would have a negative impact.
Being Bad is all I have to live for. Are you trying to kill me?
If you people think that you’re helping, then offer CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM !!! The people commenting on the covers are just saying nasty stuff about the cover, not even offering the least bit of help. No wonder she got mad.
YES, that’s all I’m saying.
The time to ask for constructive criticism is before you slap it on the book and try to sell it.
So you think that making fun of these authors or whatever you all call it here is going to help or change it in some way? I’m just trying to understand a bit better. You can’t just leave these covers alone and do better things with precious time?
I don’t know where the idea came from that the primary purpose of this website is to help clueless authors. This is an entertainment site; we do this because we think it’s funny. (I’m sure none of your own hobbies, pursuits or pastimes have such an unworthy goal, but please condescend to have pity on those of us without such towering moral stature.) The benefits which accrue to self-publishers are a secondary consideration at best.
Well then, if the primary purpose of this site is to laugh at authors’ covers… Okay then… I’m concerned for our country if these are your moral standards. I’m very concerned if so many people find humor in ripping work apart in this fashion.
Oh, golly. If *this* site makes you concerned for our country, I shudder to think how you’ll react when you discover the *entire rest of the internet.*
Why would you want to lower your standards and be like nearly everyone else on “the entire rest of the Internet” then? Don’t you want to be the better person, or is it really that much more fun joining the rest of the crowd? It’s very worrying to think that people find this humurous. What’s next? *shakes head sadly*
This site exists exactly because of other people’s low standards.
Low, low, low standards when it comes to putting book covers out there into the wide world.
Whereas I shake my head sadly at someone so self-righteous that she believes that anyone who enjoys what she doesn’t is bringing down the country and probably going to hell. Goodbye, EmmyWilly. Go be a concern troll somewhere else.
EW – I have to say, you clearly have not read enough of the comments on this site. This stuff is HIGH-larious HIGH-brow and witty stuff here.
Boo hoo!
Go home!
You and reality aren’t on speaking terms, are you?
Thank you for not reading anything which I or any other longtime participant of the site have written on the matter, Kat. You are now welcome to visit engrish.com, FailBlog, PeopleofWalmart.com, and every other crowdsourced humor site and tell them how nasty and unhelpful they are.
PeopleofWalmart can be hilarious, but that is a bit nasty. Those people did not go to Walmart in order to be pasted around the internet and be laughed at: even if admittedly they did choose to leave their apartments looking like they did. However, if you publish something, then you have consciously made the choice of it being spread around the internet – and being laughed at, if it does bring joy to people.
Guess what? Paying customers don’t offer CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM (however many exclamation marks you want to put after it). And this applies to books published by big publishing houses, and books that are highly acclaimed among their target market, as much as it does for amateur efforts like this. Write a sweet fantasy-romance that is beloved by teenagers? Some middle-aged curmudgeonly virgin will read it and write a hateful review of how childish and saccharine and unrealistic it is because unicorns don’t exist. Write a highly intelligent and witty satire enjoyed by the highly educated? Someone who is thick as pigshit and has no sense of humour will read it and hate it.
When a book is published, whether it’s a DIY effort or goes through a publishing house, people will (hopefully) buy it and read it, and some of them will review it. Some reviews are by people who like the book and the author enjoys reading them. Some dislike the book for personal reasons but try to write a fair review, and some have valid points, and sensible authors should take notice of these reviews. Some obnoxious reviews are from people who hate the book for reasons that are really quite ridiculous, and some reviews of books that are not self published bring up problems that are the publishers’ faults, to the authors’ perennial annoyance. It is not possible to write something that *everyone* will like, and believe me, publishing books and having people buy them and hate them is better than publishing a book and no-one buying them and silence prevailing.
So, if you can’t deal with not being able to pick and choose who the consumer/reader is, don’t publish books. Or if you must, get them printed privately and control your distribution network so you only sell them to people who won’t criticise them. If you have published a book and someone writes bad things about it, and this person paid for the book, ignore the review and take solace in the fact that at least you have their money. If you asked for the review and the reviewer hated it, even if they were stupid about it, show you are bigger than them for thanking them politely for their time and feedback, and move on.
Yup. It’s something that seems to be too often forgotten: we are paying costumers. They can defend their bad choices all day long, we’re still the ones to decide where we put our money.
Very well said Axolotl! One of the biggest things authors need to learn is to have a thick skin, and YES to take valid criticism. Some people will hate your work (sometimes with valid reason, other times because…well just because) and some people will love it.
But covers are very important. It’s the first thing you see of the book.
Nice cover? Sweet! Let me read the blurb? Good blurb! Awesome, maybe I’ll buy the book. And so it goes…
While I’m fairly confident in my own skills as cover designer, I ALWAYS get several opinions of my designs from people I know will be honest with their feedback. Just like getting beta readers that will be frank with me about the book itself. It’s just as important! The cover IS part of your packaging and marketing, you WANT it to appeal to the reader. Same with the blurb (which more than a few on here have had equally horrendous blurbs).
When I see a shitty cover, what it tells me is that the author DID NOT care enough to make the cover professional and appealing. They didn’t BOTHER to get feedback or maybe even look at other covers in their genre to gauge if it would appeal to their target audience. If they can’t be bothered to put effort into the cover (or pay someone else when their skills are not up to par) how should I have any confidence that the text inside will be of a better quality?
I know I’m not an editor and CANNOT polish the text by myself alone, so I pay someone to edit. Same goes with covers. If you cannot make a professional cover, higher someone that has the skills, or be prepared not to be taken seriously.
You’re doing it right, Jennifer Howell. 😉
Exactly Jennifer.
There is a huge disconnect with some writers, who believe readers owe them their time.
Some writers say they ‘can’t afford’ a good cover or editing or even the time to write a good enough book. This transfers all the effort onto the reader to do the author a favour.
If you don’t have the passion and commitment to make a book the best it can be, stop writing, stop promoting and stop making lousy covers. Readers owe you nothing. You as a writer owe them.
ps, I’m a writer, and the world doesn’t owe me anything. I’m doing all the hard work at my end so the reader doesn’t have to.