Yeah, it does if you look at it from the publisher point of view.
Indies deprive publishers of money because they don't have to deal with that person.
By not having Indie Writer Jo Blow in their stable, publishers lost a chance at getting a winner.

For starters, they can exude pressure on bookstores everywhere. 

Exactly.
Indies are competition to the big book publishers. This is how they push back and try to
preserve their turf.

I wonder if the decline in printed media is affecting publishers too.

Well, with indie games, there's still a significant barrier to entry in the form of requiring significant programming skill if the game is even going to work at all. With indie films, they're either largely ignored, they go to film festivals and then get ignored afterward, or they gravitate toward things like Youtube. And for all but the most ridiculously underfunded films, you're going to need more camera/lighting/effects/editing equipment than just your cell phone and stuff around the house. They're further helped by the fact that games and movies are almost always collaborative efforts, and odds are that at least some of the people working on it know what they're doing and will steer the incompetent ones in the right direction.

But with indie books, (for better or worse) the barrier to entry is very low. In half an hour, you could get a book full of utter gibberish published on Amazon and have it placed right alongside authors who actually know what they're doing. You can't spend half an hour putting together some shaky cellphone footage of nothing and then get that into an independent film festival.

With traditional publishing, bad-ish books can still make it through, but at least one person at some point had to look over it and think it was acceptable.

But when you have a medium in which someone can publish when they're the only one who's ever laid eyes on the work ... it opens the playing field up to the amateurs, the delusional, and the just plain bad. And if audiences experience the amateur, the delusional, and the just plain bad, some of them are inevitably going to generalize that to the entire medium. (Not to mention the stigma that self-publishing still carries from the past, when it was generally the last resort of an author who failed to be accepted at any major publisher, and books rejected by every possible publisher were generally quite bad.)

Now, my intent here isn't to bash independent publishing, only to point out that the way it's structured will inevitably lead to the perception of low quality control. It's a challenge that independent authors will have to overcome. And I don't think there's any easy solution. As long as the barrier to entry is low, sub-par works will frequently be published that way, and the reading public will tend to associate all self-published works with those sub-par ones.

The best solution I can think of is to have a set of awards and recognitions, possibly endorsed by Amazon, giving indie authors special status for reaching certain levels of popularity and/or critical acclaim. Then you can still have the low barrier to entry, but you might also be able to accrue some respect in a gate-kept category like 'Amazon Gold Author' or some such.
(Of course, that opens the possibility of unfairness in giving such status ... potentially creating whole new problems.)

4772316

The best solution I can think of is to have a set of awards and recognitions, possibly endorsed by Amazon, giving indie authors special status for reaching certain levels of popularity and/or critical acclaim. Then you can still have the low barrier to entry, but you might also be able to accrue some respect in a gate-kept category like 'Amazon Gold Author' or some such.

I like this, but I'd want it taken a step further and made independent of Amazon at all, but maybe funded enough that it can still get some serious notoriety. Just something in the industry that took indie books seriously would be nice.

The closest Amazon does, unfortunately, is best-sellers ... which is frequently taken advantage of by click-farms and very open to publicized abuse, which has tainted it.

Without reading the article yet, I'm going to guess that the reason is publisher propaganda.

4772320
I think it also doesn't help that a lot of times in the indie publishing scene, there's a sense of 'Quantity is quality.' You find success not by writing well, but by writing a lot. Place the blame with the audience, with the pricing expectations, with the limited time window that even excellent books have to make sales ... but the result is the same: the system tends to reward authors who pump out dozens of mediocre books over ones who take their time to carefully craft a few masterpieces.

That's also going to damage the reputation of indie publishing. Maybe the effect could be lessened with more carefully designed sorting and recommendation algorithms, but at this point, there's a lot of momentum behind it, so it's not going to be an easy trend to reverse.

4772316

Well, with indie games, there's still a significant barrier to entry in the form of requiring significant programming skill if the game is even going to work at all. With indie films, they're either largely ignored, they go to film festivals andthenget ignored afterward, or they gravitate toward things like Youtube. And for all but the most ridiculously underfunded films, you're going to need more camera/lighting/effects/editing equipment than just your cell phone and stuff around the house. They're further helped by the fact that games and movies are almost always collaborative efforts, and odds are that at least some of the people working on it know what they're doing and will steer the incompetent ones in the right direction.

But with indie books, (for better or worse) the barrier to entry is very low. In half an hour, you could get a book full of utter gibberish published on Amazon and have it placed right alongside authors who actually know what they're doing. You can't spend half an hour putting together some shaky cellphone footage of nothing and then get that into an independent film festival.

To add to this, look at things from the consumer's side of the equation. To decide whether or not you like a song, you spend all of three or four minutes listening to it. For a video game, you'll know if you like the gameplay within half an hour. Movies are usually no more than one and a half, two hours. But for a book, it can take days worth of reading before you know if it's good.

If it turns out that the book is in that unfortunate place between excellent (where you don't want to put it down) and crap (where the bad quality is obvious from the first page), readers can feel like they've wasted too much time with something that they didn't like. Most people simply won't want to take the risk. On the other hand, if a successful publisher is backing the book then readers will know that people with financial stake in the quality of the story have decided it's good enough to sell.

This leaves indie books in an awkward place - it's easy for a bad story to get out into the world, and readers (currently) can only separate the gold nuggets from the dross the hard way.

That certainly doesn't justify the hypocrisy against indie authors, but could be at least part of the reason why they have a hard time getting acceptance by the general public.

4772331
You are not the first to say that, and personally, they definitely play a part.

4772567
This is a really good point. I may quote this in a follow-up piece.

4772657
This is also a good point, and an interesting one. Again it seems to come down to "there needs to be more tools out there for readers to find, such as book reviews and gold awards," so that they're not faced 100% with sorting the dross from the gold.

Note that, IIRC, Atari tried to suppress Activision in just this way--and Nintendo has successfully prevented any third party from releasing software for the Nintendo for, what, 35 years now? Nintendo is ruthless and frequently exerted illegal pressure on game stores.

Okay, indie games.

First things first, they are rarely indie.
Long gone are the times when you had to pay for discs, jewel cases, had to push your game onto the very limited shelf space of retail shops.
Yeah, there were (and are) sometimes successful attempts to sell the game on your own website (from casual games of 00s to Rimworld).
However, today most of the indies do have a publisher, the owner of the store.

Bad news, there's a single store per platform (no, GOG, GMG, EA Store/Origin, itch.io, defunct Impulse are largely irrelevant for PC sales).
I don't know if Kongregate is still alive (and if it took 30% sales cut and an admission fee), but it was publishing games all the same.
MMOs are self-published quite often, but making a MMO is roughly an order of magnitude costlier so quite a lot of money can be spent on marketing.

So if you're indie, you've got to go to Steam and conform to its rules.
Though they are pretty lenient and usually you just have to leave sexual content available as a patch "somewhere else", there's no other game in PC town.

Good news, store owners nurture indies, because for the owner store it's a win-win all around:
1) you don't have to pay for the development and care about milestones and check the budget and intervene if the project goes awry (from your standpoint)
2) you are paid for marketing (not vice-versa)
3) who cares if the game tanks or booms, you've got your profit from any sale anyway
Steam even closed their greenlight program because of the last point.

Now, about 2/3 of Steam store is indies and it looks like http://store.steampowered.com/search/?sort_by=Released_DESC&category1=998&os=win
It's not a fountain of creativity, it's endless loads of cheap shovelware.
Sure, Sturgeon's Law applies to each facet of human creativity, however, that's not the point.

Ok, let's turn to books.
Big 5 sales are declining year after year and it's clear that Amazon is the Steam for books, as in, the main venue of digital book distribution.
Oh, wait, Amazon started as a book store. Nevermind, it's dominance as a publisher became clear only in this decade.

And we get nearly the same picture, rare gems hidden in the vast wasteland of bad craftsmanship.

But there are two crucial differences with games:
1) You can't judge a book by its cover, but you can judge the game by its screenshots. Let's return to http://store.steampowered.com/search/?sort_by=Released_DESC&category1=998&os=win Just hovering over entries for second or two will give you an idea, do you want to look closer or not. Good luck trying it with the books.
2) Games allow a lot of superficial agency. You can't switch storylines in the book (no, no, it's not CYOA time!), but you have a lot more agency in interpreting it. That makes it much harder to recommend books, because "a thought-provoking book about the frailty of the human character in a time of war" says you much less than "it's a good turn-based fantasy strategy, but the economic layer is pretty mediocre".

Let's return to games.
Things with them are easy enough, but a lot of people have not a lot of free time to scour the new releases list (or just plain lazy) and millions of them refer to... drum roll... gate-keepers!
Oh, I mean, http://store.steampowered.com/curators/ or a favorite youtuber or twitch streamer.
They vet, critique, suggest and people follow.

With books, yeah, the same people do want a guarantee of quality from someone who they trust to save even more time and/or effort than games.
The responsibility on these fearless leaders is even heavier, because you can show the game and not spoil much, but you can't show the book without spoiling it.
So, naturally, these people would prefer someone with their skin in the game...

Who said "publishers"?

So it goes.

4772316
With games... Yes, but no.
If you look closely on the most popular items in https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/search/page=1/sortby=rating/query=category:1 , you'll start noticing bits of it flying around in released (admittedly, cheap) games.
It's not an issue per se, it's much faster and easier to buy high-quality rocks for $25 than to model them, but there's a lot of asset-swaps on the market.
As in you take something like https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/80368 , replace some items and proudly release as your own.

And let's not even mention the mobile games market.
It's pure cancer.

4772854
Well, goodreads.com tried to do that.
I think, there's a lot of lesser known recommendation sites for books.

However, humans are humans and without an authoritarian authority each of these decentralized places naturally forms cliques which then fight for power (yep, over everything) in bitter partisan wars.
Then one of the cliques wins and reigns over the wasteland, because people who just wanted to read books (remember the 1:10:100 ratio) went elsewhere.

With an authoritarian in charge the place quickly outgrows the capacity of a single person and that person is forced either to scale down or delegate. In the latter case, see above with subtle differences.

Well, everything has an expiration date, hasn't it?

Huh. Commented on the exterior blog post, only to come here and find a lot of commentary... which says something about the value of platforms, doesn't it? I won't repeat myself here again, but there are good points made above about the structural virtues of tastemaking and endorsement in the different arts. Time investment is totally more important in reading than it is in music, and inherent barriers to entry in games and movies are greatly higher than they are in music and books. Amazingly awful film like The Room is less common than, say, Chuck Tingle kindle-clutter.

I think the virtue-signaling aspect of reading is fading rapidly, though, with the advent of e-books and kindles and the like. The interior-decorating value of 'good books' is detaching from the actual books we read. You can't show off your superior taste in books with an e-book file, you have to go out and buy a display copy. It becomes something like buying wall-art.

This is one of those rare cases where the comments add just as much to the discussion as the original blog. Fascinating, thought-provoking stuff all around... not that I really have anything to add to it. Any points I might have made have already been laid out in fine detail. Still, thanks for getting this conversation started.

Maybe it's because a lot of the authors I like are encouraging other pros to go independent, but I've never seen this attitude outside of the "literary" crowd and the big publishers themselves.

While a lot of the old material I like was handled by the big publishers decades ago, new stuff that I like usually comes out of small publishers or indies. I read The Martian back when it was on Weir's website, because no publisher wanted it.

In any case, the authors hanging out over at the blog linked above all agree with your assessment: it's the publishers themselves, the (increasingly few) authors who are well-paid by those same publishers, the literary magazines, the reviewers... all the people who benefit from the current system who are pushing the "indie is full of shit" meme.

The catch is, all of us who read stuff the publishers don't want to print? We've already gone off the reservation.

My initial thought on seeing the thesis of the blog, something I've not considered previously, aligns with 4772316 and the notion of barriers to entry. If someone's putting out a record or making a video game, you know some effort's gone into them learning a skill before applying it. But writing? Anyone can write. People write all the time! Obviously, no effort has gone into writing a book if it hasn't been vetted by a major publisher. :V

That said, the amount of time I've spent coming to terms with the idea that indie music isn't just "music by people who aren't good enough to sell records" lends credence to your publisher control theory. (Though indie music is still afflicted by people who can't make music, the quotient seems to have decreased over the last decade-plus, if only because I have more appreciation for it now. Then again, some of the "indie rock playlists" I follow have featured unknown bands like R.E.M., so who's to say indie is still indie?)

The question then becomes, why hasn't what happened to indie music happened to indie books? Maybe it's just a matter of time, more Martians showing up and telling everyone "HEY THIS IS LEGIT!" But you definitely can't measure it by popular opinion, as that is easily manipulated.

4773944

With books, yeah, the same people do want a guarantee of quality from someone who they trust to save even more time and/or effort than games.
The responsibility on these fearless leaders is even heavier, because you can show the game and not spoil much, but you can't show the book without spoiling it.
So, naturally, these people would prefer someone with their skin in the game...

Who said "publishers"?

Not me. Fimfiction works much better for me than book publishers to identify good stories. Look at how the community works. Not the featured box, which is a cancer, but the way people get recommendations from each other. It works.

4774028 R.E.M. is indie because they made it big on an indie label, Hib-Tone Records. They switched to major labels after they got famous, but they wouldn't have gotten famous with a major label. You'll find them mentioned in any history of indie rock, because they were one of the first big bands to come from an indie label.

Not digging through the comments (yet), but some thoughts:

Saying that the anti-indie-books stereotype is the fault of the Publishing industry is a bit silly, in my opinion, as most publishers are kind of flailing a bit as-is. The market quite simply isn't as big as it used to be, on account of all kinds of technological and societal changes.

I've thought about the indie books vs. indie music thing before, And I think a lot of it boils down to a matter of, well, effort. I'm not saying it's easier to program a game than it is to write a novel (or vice versa). Rather, there's the general IDEA that it's easier to write a novel than it is to record an album or whatever. I mean, all you need is a computer with a word processor, right?

In turn, there have always been "Vanity publishers" putting out utter crap, operating on a predatory business model. Want to see your book in print, no questions asked? Great! Just give us a box of money and you'll soon have a trunk full of copies of your book that you can try to unload on the unsuspecting!

This stigma still kind of hangs around self publishing/e-publishing-- there are, of course, exceptions like The Martian and so on. But it's hard to sift the wheat from the chaff in a lot of this stuff, even if there are some authors who have had a ton of success from the ebook model.

I think a lot of this stems from a prejudice against vanity presses in academic and literary circles.

It's understandable from a professional viewpoint: in those fields, publication is a credit that can get you jobs, tenure and professional memberships (like in the SFWA). So some sort of gatekeeper is required or else everyone will have résumés a mile long. With academic journals there's a jury of one sort or another, and with poems, stories and books there's a publisher. The quality of what's published varies of course but at least you get some testimony, from other professionals, that the author in question did enough work of sufficient quality to be taken seriously.

The SFWA, for example, used to require someone to have at least one paid published work to be considered for membership, and anyone who met that standard was usually accepted (for years it was a small genre and they wanted as many members as possible). This system started causing problems in the 90's, largely because the bar was so low. It completely broke down in the 21st century with widespread Internet publication. M. C. Hogarth is one of the people trying to fix it, and God help her.

(Please note that the above is an outsider view, but based on first-hand testimony from insiders--what? Of course you can believe me! I'm a random guy on the Internet!)

Two fun facts:

Lord Dunsany's The Gods of Pegāna, which went on to influence authors as diverse as Tolkien and Lovecraft, was first published by a vanity press. He couldn't get anyone else to touch it. He went on to publish 92 books, myriad short stories, and numerous plays which were performed with critical and commercial success.

Umberto Eco gives a very amusing description of a vanity press's business model in Foucault's Pendulum. Basically, they make money by fleecing kooks. Now, Eco was both an academician and a bestselling author, so take that with a grain of salt. But it's still pretty funny in a mean-spirited way.

4774044
Historically, sure. But currently?

4774042
Sure.
Anyone who can afford and is willing to spend enough time and effort will find an interesting indie author eventually.
More than that, as you can't survive as an indie without a network, anyone can (a bit more time and effort) unravel the whole cluster of connections from that author's recommendations and readers' comments.

Like a lot of things in life, it just requires a little bit of dedication to start and a bit of time to maintain.
The problem is, there are enough such things to fill a hundred of lives.

It's easy enough to imagine that there are mature, well-adjusted people who (gasp!) don't know or don't want to learn how to use discount coupons or how to change oil in their car or how to build a PC or what a multicooker is or can't repair a simple flush toilet.
They just request services from people, who, for instance, don't have a faintest idea how to use an oscilloscope or think that acoustics is just a type of a guitar.
I think, that is called civilization.

4774155

Anyone who can afford and is willing to spend enough time and effort will find an interesting indie author eventually.
More than that, as you can't survive as an indie without a network, anyone can (a bit more time and effort) unravel the whole cluster of connections from that author's recommendations and readers' comments.

I don't think so. The social network on fimfiction works. No social network that I know of works at identifying indie novel authors. You can't unravel those connections from author recommendation and reader comments, because there are usually no author recommendations, and the only location that collects reader comments is on the story itself--its Amazon or Goodreads page. Which defeats the purpose, because you can't find those comments until you've already found the story.

It's easy enough to imagine that there are mature, well-adjusted people who (gasp!) don't know or don't want to learn how to use discount coupons or how to change oil in their car or how to build a PC or what a multicooker is or can't repair a simple flush toilet.
They just request services from people, who, for instance, don't have a faintest idea how to use an oscilloscope or think that acoustics is just a type of a guitar.
I think, that is called civilization.

If you're implying that having a few dictators at the New York Times and the New York Review of Books, who all went to the same schools and think the say way, tell us what to read (which is the true situation now in literary novels), is "civilization", I disagree strenuously. It resembles some civilizations, such as the Aztec or Assyrian Empires, in which one tribe controls all the others. But I think we can do better than that.

4774108 "Currently" implies that an indie band can become non-indie.

What matters, IMHO, is how they were discovered. Did they have to get by the gatekeepers? Anyone who got famous by being approved by the gatekeepers is not indie. Anyone who got famous by going around the gatekeepers is indie, regardless of what they do later on, because they never had to conform to the rules of the gatekeepers.

Because that's the whole point of "indie"--it means somebody who didn't have to play by the rules and be approved by the gatekeepers.

There are exceptions--the Beatles became famous by writing bubblegum pop that made it past the gatekeepers, and then became powerful enough to make whatever music they wanted to. Although even then, we don't call them an indie band.

4774185
Its not just novels, its movies, games and almost anything at this point it seems.

After gamergame happened back a few years ago and i watched it from the sideline, i honestly dont trust any "review" that much. Rather wait for user reviews and other methods if applicable (like gameplay on youtube for games).

Just because someone is paid to "review" things does not mean they are any good at it sadly, or that they in general enjoy they medium they are reviewing.

4774185

a few dictators at the New York Times and the New York Review of Books, who all went to the same schools and think the say way, tell us what to read (which is the true situation now in literary novels)

As someone who dabbles in both worlds, I can tell you that's certainly not true, at least in today's literary scene.

The main thing they're looking for is authors who do something new and interesting with language -- with the language itself -- as well as having interesting and meaningful stories. That usually does mean that the story is more than just the surface level, and often means that it could take multiple readings to really be able to appreciate it ... or even decipher it. A good literary work will sustain being read over and over again, giving you new and interesting things to appreciate each time. That can mean things as dense and heavy as Jose Saramago's The Cave or as light and (darkly) humorous as Haruki Murakami’s After the Quake. The former is a dystopian novel, and the latter is a bunch of silly stories, up to and including 'Superfrog'. I'd highly recommend both, though I'll warn you that Saramago doesn't use proper sentence structure or punctuation. His sentences that go on and on for multiple pages are part of what he's doing with the language itself.

4774042
So.... Knighty takes over the book market in the future?

4774201

The main thing they're looking for is authors who do something new and interesting with language -- with the language itself...

Yes, and I don't give a damn about that. I want good stories. I'm not much interested in their experimentation with English, at least not while it's still just experimentation.

And the emphasis on doing something "new" with English usually damages the story. Say what you will about Finnegan's Wake, it's a lousy story.

(The whole emphasis on doing something "new" is based on the modernist/post-modernist metaphysics which says that content--what actually happens in the story--is merely a matter of what elements are in the story, not in how they are causally arranged, and therefore content is not a possible source of novelty or interest. This is because modernists and especially post-modernists are essentially Platonists, and believe neither in original ideas, nor that an idea can emerge from a structure rather than from an essence. It's more complicated than that, but that's their basic metaphysics. You can find parts of this metaphysic expressed in doctrinal modernist and post-modernist writings such as "Cubism" (Gleize & Metzinger 1912), "Death of the Author" (Barthes 1968), and On Grammatology (Derrida).)

as well as having interesting and meaningful stories

Interesting and meaningful stories of particular types, by particular people, about particular topics. I've already posted 4 blog posts on this topic, so I'll just link to them rather than repeat myself. See:

• the section The three kinds of permissible novels in How I took a literary theory class and accidentally stopped hating Republicans, part 1
• the section Splintering into English and Creative Writing in HITALTCAASHR part 3.2: Teaching English: 1987-1990
• all of White Teeth: Anatomy of a 'quality' bestseller
• Review--Creating Faulkner's Reputation

There's a big difference between asking whether good novels are published (sure, some are), and asking whether any good novel can get published. The restrictions on what can get published in the English language are currently very narrow. Non-"white" authors, like the ones you mentioned, have more leeway, but they have their own sets of restrictions imposed, most significantly the expectation that their book will in some way represent their race or culture rather than be a personal vision.

*cracks knuckles* Well, this post exploded with discussion! Good discussion too! Definitely going to have to do a follow up where I bring in a lot of your input later this week, or flat-out quote some of you. I would have done it today, but Being a Better Writer took precedence.

That said, even accounting for a broader post later this week, I do want to respond to a few really quick ...

4773944
It's sounds like one thing you're espousing here is that books need more exposure. You make the point of screenshots. Well, one can flip through the first hundred or so pages of Colony on the storefront ... but how many know that? I've mentioned before in other book posts that a lot of features indie authors try to take advantage of simply aren't advertised or made clear enough to the market.

But you also raise the more important point, as many here did, of a lack of curators. Simply put, there isn't anything comparable to the tools the big five have at getting word out there about a "good" book or not. And crud, the few indie book review places I've seen have both been small, working hard at getting picked up by one of the big publishers for the $$$, and/or been incredibly politically charged/divisive (a "review" where the reviewer stated the book was so good they might have even liked it if the main characters had been white comes to mind).

Anyway, you're right. There's no good recommendation or curation feature for indie books. The closest I can get is good reviews from reviewers, but is there a review aggregate out there that pulls all those together? Probably not.

4773973
Platform weirdness is it's own thing. Though most people here already have accounts, and posting on my site does require an e-mail address (for purposes of spam filtration, but people balk at it all the same). But there was a point where posting the full text of each article led to a decline in readership in both places. Stuff's weird.

4774052

Saying that the anti-indie-books stereotype is the fault of the Publishing industry is a bit silly, in my opinion, as most publishers are kind of flailing a bit as-is. The market quite simply isn't as big as it used to be, on account of all kinds of technological and societal changes.

Oh you would be surprised. They're flailing, sure, but that also means that they're lashing out as hard as they can at anything they see as "damaging." And it's targeted. For example, Hachette's investor slides had a whole section on all of the indie publishers they were buying out of the business (over 40 in one year). The goal, they told investors, was twofold: First, to reduce competition in the market by acquiring other publishing outlets, and second, by gaining control of the contracts of authors signed with those small publishers and crushing the ones they didn't want competing with their own works. This isn't fearmongering, this was straight up in their investor presentation. The iron fist of the big 5.

Secondly, if you follow news about the market, the lashing isn't hard to see. For example, last year there was a two-month period where once a week an article was published in a major newspaper about the "death of ebooks" or how "studies (which we won't cite) say ebooks are bad for your brain," etc etc. Each of these articles were rewrites of the same thing that's gone back for half a decade now. And when checking the byline, you would find that it was either sourced entirely by a head editor or marketer from one of the big five, or "cooperatively written" between a head editor/marketer from one of the big five and the "author" of the article. There will then be a lull for a few months, and then another two-three month push starts up. A new article each week, like clockwork.

So while things are changing, publishers fight it tooth and nail.

Rather, there's the general IDEA that it's easier to write a novel than it is to record an album or whatever. I mean, all you need is a computer with a word processor, right?

It'll probably never die, but it certainly would be nice if that stigma did.

4774235
Sure, there are some valid criticisms, especially from a casual reader's perspective.
A good way to look at it is that while genre writing is meant to primarily be entertainment, literary writing (though it's really just another genre) is meant to primarily be art.

And as art, the subject matter is often less important than the technique used to portray it. They like to throw the word 'aboutness' around. Basically, the same reason you don't go to a (modern-ish) art museum and see a bunch of photo-realistic portrayals. The way the artist puts his ideas on the canvas can be more important than the ideas themselves. Perhaps think of it as a longer form of poetry -- where sounding beautiful as you say it is as (or more) important as what's said.

Yeah, it's not for everybody. (And while we're at it, let's not pretend that every publisher is obsessed with (or even interested in) 'literary' works. Literary books are generally not strong sellers, and most publishers are interested in what makes money.)

4774415
I would say the total opposite. That aboutness is a core value of art, and anything which is about nothing but technique is trash, dross - to be burnt away by the next fire to burn through the academy. Substance is the only thing that will survive time.

4774210 knighty, or someone who's learned from knighty and websites like this one.
But authors will need to be able to opt to charge readers for reading some of their stories.

Nice, thought-provoking essay!

Some random thoughts:

Indie books are different from indie bands, movies, and games I one very important way: They’re solitary works that often get little to no feedback. One of the most important things I've learned writing for FiMFic, is to get editors/pre-readers who have been critical (but fair) of previous works. Prepreaders who won't let you get away with anything are invaluable. But most indie writers don't have people who will be both willing and able to do that for them. Oh, they coerce their friends into reading their manuscript, sure... but their friends aren't usually professional-level editors, or willing to tell them their book sucks.

So, with an indie book, it’s hard to tell if it’s bad right away, for the writer as well as the reader. (Unless the basics of spelling and grammar are obviously terrible from the outset.) Crafting a good story arc with a satisfying ending is hard and even experienced writers often screw it up… which means a reader doesn’t know the book is bad until it’s too late. This isn’t to say that an indie can’t be good, it’s just that I think that a much higher percentage of them are not only bad, but disappointing, and that probably exacerbates their bad rap.

BTW, The Martian was originally written as a blog, and got a huge amount of feedback.

As far as I can tell, the main group of people who are making a go at indie publishing are professionals who are continuing published works/worlds on their own. Publishers will often drop a series when it falls below a certain level of sales, so switching to indie for those authors makes a lot of sense.

Another thing is cover art. Yes, it really has nothing to do with the quality of the writing, but people who say “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” are shaking their fists at the thunderstorm. People do judge a book by its cover. A crappy cover is an instant turn-off; the first impression a potential buyer has of the book triggers the UNPROFESSIONAL warning light in their mind. So a good indie with a terrible cover just (unfairly) adds to the bad rap.

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Yes, and I don't give a damn about that. I want good stories. I'm not much interested in their experimentation with English…

**insert raucous cheering section here**

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As excellent as Fimfiction, I don't think its possible to make it the writing equivilent of Twitch, Youtube, or Steam because of the lack of revenue streams. A relative unknown can rise on any of these websites because of the advertising. Publishing supported by advertising doesn't have money streams that it did before the age of the internet. The freedom of the internet itself has contributed to the downfall for publishing and writing revenue streams because it was the first thing that became free.

People don't want to pay of for publishing anymore like they have in previous decades, and the greatest advertising resume clicks and videos which most writing itself lacks.

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Substance is the only thing that will survive time.

Well, you say that ... but a lot of the classics you'll study in school aren't necessarily classics because of what they say, but how they say it. They're often the first to use a certain technique or style. They're often studied because they were the first to do something, not necessarily the best.

Take Faulkner for example. He's not still read because people want to read about Yoknapatawpha County, but because people love the way he wrote about it. He just puts together some truly marvelous sentences like

Now she too would know the old thrill and the old despair of a penny more or less.

Or take Walt Whitman. Though that's poetry, not fiction, he was a pioneer of form. Before him, poetry was largely in verse -- mostly in strict poetic forms -- and tended to focus on upper-class concerns. Then he comes along, writing (mostly) in free verse, hardly ever rhyming, and writing about the glory of the working man and the pauper. And that's (part of) why he's considered the father of American poetry, is extremely influential, and is still one of the most widely read and studied poets ... ever.
Could Walt Whitman have achieved such greatness while sticking within the tradition of sonnets and rondeaus? Perhaps -- he was good at what he did, and does have some decent poems that use forms. But no matter the skill, I don't think he would have the same notoriety and influence without his innovation in form.

Or take Tolkien (an author I fully expect to see accepted among the canonical literary greats in a hundred years or so). A lot of his staying power comes from how he was one of the first to create such a high fantasy masterpiece. And, sure, there's good content there ... but the innovation is also very important -- the innovation is what sets him apart from what came before and from all those who have been inspired to follow in his example.

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So priority is more important than the functionality or the originality? Because to a certain extent, Bad Horse's argument is that Faulkner's advantage is the political advantage of the old bull's advance men.

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So priority is more important than the functionality or the originality?

What is priority if not originality?

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The social network on fimfiction works.

Fanfics are mostly using stock characters with much less freedom both for author's and reader's interpretation of them.
While it's not formulaic and "a bittersweet RariTwi shipfic" can surprise you in a number of ways, you still do understand what to expect.

No social network that I know of works at identifying indie novel authors.

In order to earn a living as an indie writer you kinda have to maintain online presence, engage the audience, do attempts at co-promotion with fellow writers in the same boat. Writers do form their networks.

Which defeats the purpose, because you can't find those comments until you've already found the story.

Yep. That's why I said "eventually stumble".

If you're implying that having a few dictators … is "civilization", I disagree strenuously.

Of course, because that's not what I said.
I'm saying that the option to procure services you don't want or can do is one of the aspects of civilization.

There are people who are willing to pay for the privilege of someone making a choice for them, from a choice in law matters to a choice of hot dog bun.
In fact, we are them.

But I think we can do better than that.

We did.

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but how many know that?

But how many have time to flip through a hunderd of pages or forty minutes of reading?
Books do compete with all other forms of entertainment for the scarce free time of the reader. Why won't I go and buy Factorio instead?

is there a review aggregate out there

If it is and is relevant, it'll be endlessly manipulated.
See practically any literary award until it gets beaten to death with asterisks.

The main problem isn't even about exposure.
It's about time, time and again time.

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Priority is Varney the Vampire. Originality is Carmilla.

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But you also raise the more important point, as many here did, of a lack of curators. Simply put, there isn't anything comparable to the tools the big five have at getting word out there about a "good" book or not …

Adding to the agree pile on that.

And I don't think any discussion of "why people unfairly and incorrectly think indie books are crap" is complete unless it can reconcile with the fact that — I'm pretty certain without exception — every commenter here thinks the stories in the FIMFiction Featurebox are collectively crap.

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Well, not always. With the mature filter on, good stuff shows up in there occasionally.

Of course, that simply makes me think "Wait, crummy fanfiction is good, but crummy cheap (or free) books are bad?

And then Hermes just yells in my head "That just raises further questions!"

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the stories in the FIMFiction Featurebox are collectively crap

The very finest crap that Fimfiction can produce! ^.^

Seriously, though. The feature box only shows what's recently popular. When you complain about what's in it, you're really just complaining about the collective tastes of the Fimfic readers. The stuff that's there is because the majority of readers decided that it's better than the other recently-published stories.

(And there is a sort of collective gatekeeping there. Which is why new authors aspire to the validation of being featured. Say what you will about the feature box's content, it is a step above Fimfic's content in general, a step above a random selection of fanfics.)

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And as art, the subject matter is often less important than the technique used to portray it. They like to throw the word 'aboutness' around. Basically, the same reason you don't go to a (modern-ish) art museum and see a bunch of photo-realistic portrayals. The way the artist puts his ideas on the canvas can be more important than the ideas themselves. Perhaps think of it as a longer form of poetry -- where sounding beautiful as you say it is as (or more) important as what's said.

Yeah, it's not for everybody.

That's my point. The 20th-century conception of "art" has become quite narrow, and excludes everything that most people consider "art". When you say "as art, the subject matter is often less important than the technique used to portray it," you're accepting a very modern, very restrictive, and I would say very impoverished view of art.

The fine arts establishment is entirely controlled by a tiny, tiny faction with a minority view on "art"--essentially one which guts art and removes it of its content, leaving nothing behind but a shiny surface. This faction is for some reason determined to delegitimize and exclude all other types of art from museums, universities, and auditoriums, and has mostly succeeded in doing so for the past 100 years.

The publishing industry is not as narrow-minded, because it isn't subsidized by universities and by grants, and still needs to sell stuff. But it suffers some of those same problems.

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And I don't think any discussion of "why people unfairly and incorrectly think indie books are crap" is complete unless it can reconcile with the fact that — I'm pretty certain without exception —every commenter herethinks the stories in the FIMFiction Featurebox are collectively crap.

The featured box is an anomaly. It has always used a spectactularly bad algorithm that knighty refuses to change. It's not a general or inevitable phenomenon.

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Okay, I think I got most of you without double-tagging.

A second, reaction piece that effectively summarizes a lot of your comments has been put together here.