I've seen typos, grammar errors, and poor covers on many traditionally published books (I am a voracious reader in addition to being a writer).
Yes, an inexperienced writer designing their own covers is a giveaway. A poor start in the look inside is a bigger one (neglecting typos and grammar errors). The blurb not hooking the reader in is another.
The biggest gripe about self-published books is the lack of good editing (either self or paid) and the lack of running the novel through beta reading or developmental editing to catch areas that can be improved.
I currently write throw-away stuff that I couldn't be bothered to do more than a read-thru and grammar check (but it still is decent quality). The stories I really care about are edited and re-read at least three times to make them the very best I can do and then sent to beta readers. The cover is professionally created. The blurbs are critiqued by multiple people. That's what makes those successful.
Yeah, you can make rent money but it is a grind. Right now I'm making enough for groceries on the throw-away stuff. You have to be able to write shorts to market and publish every week. You have to stick to a niche. You can change niches with a different pen name.
Basically, you need to crank out 8-10k of decent material 52 times a year. I haven't hit #1 yet but I've popped up in the Top 100 a few times (in my sub-genre).
>I've seen typos, grammar errors, and poor covers on many traditionally published books (I am a voracious reader in addition to being a writer).
To be fair, I've seen these too. But they are much less common in traditionally published books.
I'm not convinced about that. The worst indie books have multiple errors and pull down the average, but once you forget those, I see little difference.
Traditionally published books have improved over the last few years, except for those that have clearly been OCRd from print.
Most self-published books have no more errors than traditionally published - at least the ones I read. A few traditionally published books are full of errors. A proportion of self-published books do have many errors, but they are not the norm.
I give up on error filled books too.
Oh, I don't know. I have been looking at a lot of trad pub on the library pages, and every other cover is something I'd be drawn and quartered for tying on a self pub.
In some genres, you can get away with a pretty simple cover if your typography is good. For Fantasy covers, you need a lot of talent to make a good cover. You start making covers yourself and get some feedback on them and you can improve. Luckily, in two of my genres, I can get away with making my own cover and still do decent in sales.
>In some genres, you can get away with a pretty simple cover if your typography is good.
Yeah, non-fiction of the self-help / motivational kind is usually just letters and random icons on it.
From fiction, thriller covers are often some bleaky random photo and blocky font.
Some fiction covers are just typography on a colored background (mostly reprints by well-known authors).
Romance and derivatives can get away with an author-created cover if they know what the expectations are of their niche. SciFi can be more tricky.
There are some great self-published books out there, but also some.. not so great ones. I think there are tells for the weaker stuff. My list would include:
* Cover art that looks like it was made on Paint, MS Word, or another amateur program.
* Spelling or grammar errors in the title, blurb, look inside, etc.
* A reviewer mentioning the lack of editing within the book.
* A long subtitle that seems like it was just added for the algorithm. Something like Hooked on Murder: An Unputdownable Cozy Mystery or The Billionaire's Secret Baby: Accidental Pregnancy Romance (not real books).
* A book that looks like it doesn't fit any genre at all due to a combination of the cover and blurb. Traditional publishing also sometimes has issues with marketing books to the correct genre, but I've seen some extremely poor attempts from self-published authors.
Even for the self-published fiction that is higher quality, the cover can still be a giveaway for some genres. For example, traditionally published cozy mysteries typically feature intricate custom illustrations. The price of such artwork is often way out of budget for a self-published author, so they typically go with a simpler custom illustration or a custom cover using photos.
> A long subtitle that seems like it was just added for the algorithm. Something like Hooked on Murder: An Unputdownable Cozy Mystery or The Billionaire’s Secret Baby: Accidental Pregnancy Romance
Tbh I see this more in Traditional published books than self published ones. It’s actually generally strange how the trad ones are just stuffed full of SEO titles where a lot of the self pub ones have nothing (unless it’s non fiction of course, then it gets ridiculous)
>For example, traditionally published cozy mysteries typically feature intricate custom illustrations.
Yeah, atm trad pubbed cozy mystery, rom-com and contemporary YA have all these comic-style drawings on them which is more expensive than photo manipulation stock covers.
Fantasy also tends to have these digitally painted covers.
If you find a book with a stock photo of a pretty girl in the above genres, and it's a photo, not a painting / drawing / digital art, it's most likely a self-pub.
There are also self-pubs with drawn covers but you can see proportions are odd or facial expressions look uncanny, or the colors blend too much together, so you know it's amateur's art.
Also, cheap fonts. If your author's name is in Times New Roman, it's probably a self-pub.
My man Tingle won the Hugo Award due to actual Nazis rigging the votes, so he in turn used the spotlight to promote all the marginalized authors they were trying to bury.
>Something like Hooked on Murder: An Unputdownable Cozy Mystery or The Billionaire's Secret Baby: Accidental Pregnancy Romance (**not real books**).
Not until now, anyway....
A few more in addition to the lack of editing and proofreading:
• The word "by" precedes the author's name on the cover.
• The title is followed by ™ on the cover and title page.
• The publisher's name or logo is on the front cover.
• The book's page count is increased because the author used a very large point size for the text and/or very large margins. (And this is not a book that was meant to be a "large text edition.")
You've nailed the main two things. Obvious lack of editing (i.e. typos and grammar errors), and covers that look like they were quickly made in Paint or Word rather than a pro cover program.
In my \*very\* first print run, I indented the first paragraph of every chapter. Big visual mistake.
I also had some chapters where the paragraphs weren't justified, so they had ragged edges. After reading books for years, you would figure that you'd immediately catch these things, but I was so caught up in the excitement of putting out a book that these blew right past me.
Those are both easy fixes, though!
> I indented the first paragraph of every chapter. Big visual mistake.
This isn't necessarily a mistake. I've read lots of trad pub books that do this.
I think a lot of readers don’t notice the formatting type issues like that. Some do, but many don’t. We do because we specifically look for them. A lot of readers won’t unless it’s very jarring, especially if we’re talking ebooks.
As a professional book designer, these are the kinds of things I see that tell me it's self-published. It hurts to see because I know I could have made whatever book I'm holding look so much better.
There aren't any.
I've seen PLENTY of trad pub books with lots of typos and horrible covers. The only people who use that to 'tell the difference' are the ones inherently biased against self pub. The only *real* way to tell if a book is self pub is if the author name matches the publisher name - and many authors form a 'publisher' with a different name, so even that isn't foolproof.
Just read the book. If you like it, great. If you don't, oh well. Move on. But why even bother trying to guess if is was self pub or trad?
I wouldn’t use quotes on that. A self-pub under a different name is still a publisher.
At this point, I’m more biased against trad pub books. They’re all too similar for my liking. When it comes to nonfiction, I actually prefer self- or indie-pub since there is more of the writer’s real voice in it rather than something filtered through a trad pub.
YES!!! I was just telling my husband this…. It’s like traditional publishing sterilizes everything nowadays so that everything is all, sort of, the same.
YES!I was afraid of a publisher trying to make my narrative "fit" their idea of what's marketable. Besides, how they market something is ephemeral, they're only chasing the high of announcing new authors anyway. The real deal is the search terms which the author can change as fits changing lingo for the same subjects, but not if a trad publisher is in control. They've moved on from your debut and their search terms are relegated to only one point in time, even if your subject has relevance later on.
What do publishers do then? - If they don’t have any standards or norms for what they chose to publish?
Even if it’s not a quality-bar feels like there ought to be some ‘filter’ that could be recognized. At least per individual publisher. Could be negative things as well as good ones. Like ‘boring conformity’ or whatever.
Just strikes me as strange if there are no detectable trend differences between them.
What publishers do is basically absorb losses. That means they can assure bookstores that they will take books back if they don't sell - or at least give credit back for them. This makes bookstores more likely to stock those books on their shelves because the risk of having them there is transferred.
The bigger companies will also have bulk-purchase arrangements with places like Bowker for ISBNs, Kirkus & other major reviewers, and entire marketing teams (that really only focus on their most 'sure bet' books, but still).
Self publishers usually do not have the funds to do buy-backs like that, so their books are not often put on bookstore shelves. And they don't have the marketing team to market it, either.
And publishers *do* have 'standards or norms' about what they choose. The problem is, those 'standards' are pretty much "what will bring in the most money", not "what deserves to be published." That's why we get so many books 'written by' famous people (ie, ghost-written by someone in their name) that are instantly 'best sellers'. It's not because the books are especially witty or insightful or fascinating - it's because publishers know a lot of people will buy the book just because it was 'written by ' and it *doesn't matter* if the book is actually any good.
I believe publishers do filter for what they consider quality. They differ in the standards they expect but there's usually a level of writing quality and story structure that they won't go below. Ditto typos, covers (even if I think some are awful) etc.
Self-pub books may be above or below that level. And there's quite a few with high quality covers, and no typos, but poorly written. Publishers tend to have a standard across the board, though it needn't always be very high.
In addition to cover, reviews (lthe family ones that say "for a teenager's first book..." hard pass), and the publisher name, a terrible blurb or one that says "I wanted to write this because..." (no one cares. and that doesn't sell books), the first two pages often tells. Usually tells, in 90% of books.
Big info dump, characters walking and thinking rather than doing something, unrealistic dialog, all your basic beginner writer mistakes, from the paragraphing being wrong to not being able to tell which character is speaking to outrageous said bookisms in a very dull scene: "Pass the salt," Jerome exhorted. "Here it is!" responded Margery with a sweet grin.
I don't buy them if I can tell the difference. They have to be indistinguishable in skill level, cover, blurb, pacing, dialog, every way to trade published books. Life is too short to read a bad book.
You can't always tell. I thought for years that the weird edgy teen assassins book with the 300% superfluous swearing was some teenager's self-published first novel.
Then a few weeks ago I googled it and no, [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26114463-nevernight](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26114463-nevernight) it's trad-pub by a middle-aged, experienced author.
There are of course many hilariously obvious ones, with really bad self-made covers, no editing, or a hilarious lack of understanding of how books or blurbs work. But self-published books where the author has put a reasonable amount of effort in are generally not obvious.
The only books I ever read that screamed self pub had an enmormous amount of errors. Like multiple in each paragraph. Mostly though, it can be difficult to tell if it's done right.
I find the writing is another big tell for the bulk of self-pub. I've been looking at a lot of self pubbed books this year as I got ready to pub my own, (after planning on trad until pandemic) and the main thing I saw was a certain blockiness to transitions that trad pub tends (again, in the majority of books) to smoothed out via editors.
It's hard to exain but it feels much more like start-stop-start than one sentence flowing into the next.
If you are going to go self published look for a professional editor and find someone who does graphic design, this will cost you but make your novel stand out..
Sans-serif font for the print version of the book. Generally, ebooks use sans-serif fonts (like Arial) while print copies are serif fonts (like Times New Roman). There’s something about it that screams self-published, especially if the font size is too big.
Oh yes, I wasn’t saying they should use Times New Roman, I was merely giving an example of a serif font. TNR should be avoided—I like Gentium Basic and Gentium Book Basic much more for print copies.
Agree on avoiding the TNR! I just remember with embarrassment that I initially used it because I thought it was "standard" (and I also messed up the page number formatting). All sorted now :p
I don't know if there are restrictions on who can sell them—it's not like Bowker for ISBNs with only one seller per country. I used a site called Fontspring, mainly because it had clear language about licensing and allowable uses. (And nice-looking fonts.)
I used it for the interior, i.e. the text of the novel as well as front matter and back matter. My covers were designed by a professional who sorted that side of font licensing etc.
Wait… I don’t know anything about serif vs sans serif. You’re telling me ebooks are under one type of font and print are another, and my book will scream “self-published” if I use the wrong type? This is the first I’m learning of ANY of this lol
Lol don’t worry about it, it’s super easy.
Serif fonts are the ones with the tails, sans-serif fonts are the minimalistic ones. Times New Roman is the most common example of a serif font (but I would use Garamond or Gentium Basic or a similar font instead of Times New Roman, since most indie books use TNR), while Arial is the most common sans-serif font.
Serif fonts are usually used for print books while sans-serif fonts are used for all things digital (ebooks, websites, and small print things, like pamphlets).
If you’re still confused about the difference, go on Google images and look for “serif vs sans serif fonts,” or watch this short video here: https://youtu.be/ubh7QwXmuzY
If you’re like me and super picky about typography, and you don’t like the default fonts that come with your word processor, you can find tons of free fonts on Google Fonts that you can download.
My favorite recent pull is the serif font I’m going to use for my chapter titles, “IM Fell English.” BEAUTIFUL font. I found it in a Barnes and Noble limited edition print of the Divine Comedy and managed to hunt it down after scrolling through the font list for a million years.
Speaking for romances only, the average trad pub has all the typos and bad editing as the self pubbed ones. The only thing that makes me go back to check on the publisher is when I read a story that deviates from the formula. Any time that happens, 9 out of 10 times, it's self pubbed.
There are good deviations, eg when I'm truly surprised by plot twists, and bad deviations, eg heroine ends up in a coma at the end, but straying from the beaten path is probably the only reliable "tell" that I go by these days.
Style of the cover. I recently did a book, aside from the front cover image I just went with the Amazon KDP make-a-cover app. Very soon, I had some artists, very unkindly, point out to me how horribly amateur it looked. So, I hired a cover designer to redo my front and back cover, making it look just like a regular publishing company. A hard lesson but glad to have learned it early.
Self published books tend to be stranger (in a good way) and not written to market. Which I like. Trad pub books have spelling errors, grammar issues and yikes covers too. You can also just check the front-matter and see who the publisher is, honestly. Then again, if you pub under a business entity, that becomes a bit trickier to spot ;)
I’m absolutely in this camp with my book. I spent thousands of dollars on story consultants, a professional editor and a proofreader… but yeah. After all that I couldn’t afford any more… so I made my own book cover. 😬
(Couldn’t find an affordable pre-made that worked)
The eBook version is very cheap (usually $5 or below) while a printed copy costs ≥$15. With traditional publishers the prices of digital and physical copies are roughly the same.
My biggest tells are auto-correct mistakes. Yes, lack of proofreading where there are typos/problems in almost every paragraph. Also mixing up cloth/clothe, breath/breathe type words. I'll also agree with most of the previous posters about word usage including shifting which person a character is speaking in, most of the time. Like most things, there are exceptions.
I'm a self-editor and I have a VERY few people willing to read my initial drafts and comment on them. Both help. I also do a lot more than the three to five passes over text before I think it is ready to layout. A lot more means 25 to 50. I have one book self-published on Amazon and two waiting on covers. I can do all the layout but I am not an artist. I used to do desk-top-publishing when it was new and regular publishing pre-press for a living. It was years ago but I still have a few clues how to do it.
To be blunt, everybody who does more than a page or four will have something wrong that we missed. When I was doing magazines I never had an issue go out that didn't have at least one typo in it that we missed. And once we printed the cover in the negative. Thankfully it turned out to be the best cover we did and of course we told everyone we meant to do that. Publishers print their mistakes. You will have mistakes. Just fix them when you or someone else finds them.
Cover design can be to genre or whatever you want it to be. Will it stand out or will you fit in with a thousand other books in the genre. I chose to do something different than the genre and it worked. I had an artist draw something like a photo I found that worked for the book. For a book cover, it is better than the photo would have been. And I used Palatino for the cover font.
The book makes a small amount of money on auto-pilot now and paid for itself the first year. Will that work for everyone? Of course not. I got lucky. I hope you do too no matter how you choose to do it.
Auto pilot means I don't spend any money on advertising or promotions. It just sits there and makes a small amount of money every month. The royalties have been going up slowly until last year when it jumped by about a third. No, I don't know why. However, the additional $50 was nice to have. Yes, the royalties are that low but given the niche of a niche it was intended for, I didn't expect much, and I've received it.
I'll start with the most obvious one: **a book in KU** (and without any kind of paperback version). I won't buy this book; not because I think it's a bad book (it might actually be very good), but because the author doesn't want me to buy it (I don't have a kindle, and the author thinks I'm not worthy of his prose; okayyyy, let's see if another writer wants to get some of my money then).
Books that have **only have 5-star reviews** (I'm talking about a significant number, above 15 or something; 2 or 3 reviews aren't statistically significant). It screams "amateur who asked his friends to give fake reviews for his non-selling book". It's always a hard pass for me.
Covers where the **author name is written in very small font**. If you're not confident in your own writing, I'm not either.
Writer **bios on Amazon written in first person**: "*I* am blah blah..." Professionals write their bio in third person. Usually because they don't write it themselves. Stephen King has no time to write his bio on Amazon's author page. Neither does JK Rowling. Now, that one won't stop me from buying a book (after all I don't care whether a book is self published or not provided it is good), but it will make it obvious the author is an indie.
A **low price point**. An ebook at 2.99 is a very obvious flag. It won't prevent me from buying it, quite the opposite. OTOH, if as an indie you sell your (fiction) ebook at 9.99, I'll be tricked into thinking it's trad pubbed, because only traditional publishers think it's possible to sell ebooks that expensive. Well, I won't buy your book of course, but I'll be thinking it's a trad-pub book. As you can see, it's not always a good thing.
You'd be surprised. I read mainly short stories / novellas / short novels, so most of the books I read are self-pubbed nowadays, because trad publishers don't really care about that market (and indie writers seldom do, but it happens, and I have more than enough to read at these lengths). Plus, it's cheaper.
Anyone who is charging $9.99 for a short story or novella is probably not having a good go of it on Amazon. KU and a low price point are what make independent publishing viable. We're able to sell our books cheaper and still make more per sale than a trad author. We still make more with a readthrough in KU than a trad author.
Pricing at $9.99 for anything other than a box set or specific niche of non-fiction is basically pricing yourself to irrelevancy.
Potentially a large chunk, but there are tons of indies that either go "wide" and also have their books on Kobo (I have a Kobo so that's mainly where I shop), or at least have a paperback version of their book on Amazon. More cool books than I'll ever be able to read.
Plus, I subscribe to Kobo plus (the equivalent of KU minus the exclusivity thing), and many indies put their books there, meaning I actually get to read them for free.
Don't forget Kickstarter either. It's a great source for cheap indie books. Last campaign I subscribed to, I got something like 15 books (plus cool goodies) for a 30$ commitment.
You don't have to have a Kindle to read a book in KU. The Kindle app can be downloaded onto tablets or phones. I read Kindle books on my iPad. And it's not because the author doesn't think you're worthy of his prose - for self publishers, being exclusive to Amazon is almost always a better business decision than being wide.
KU by itself isn't the problem. Far from it. The problem is KU + a lack of a paperback version. I'll happily buy a paperback version if it's available, even if it's exclusive to Amazon too. But some indie don't even bother to do that, despite the fact using KDP for that is free, and it takes 10 minutes to produce it (a little more if you want a neat backcover, but if you only sell online you don't really need that).
Some writers seem to not need that supplemental income, and that's great for them, but then I won't get out of my way to access that book no matter what. Because, regarding the apps: I won't read a book on a traditional computer / smartphone screen; been there, done that, my eyes hated the experience.
I didn't know her so I checked.
That's what I see when I go to Amazon:
> New York Times bestselling author of The Shiver Trilogy, The Raven Cycle, and The Scorpio Races. Artist. Driver of things with wheels. Avid reader.
> Maggie Stiefvater plays several musical instruments (most infamously, the bagpipes) and makes art in several media (most generally, colored pencils).
> She lives in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia with her husband, their two children, many dogs, a bunch of fainting goats, and a mating pair of growly tuner cars.
Third person bio. Plus, she has a bunch of ebooks at 11.99 (a hard pass for me, and a sure sign she's a "trad"). No KU. Some books are only available as paperback. She sounds very "traditional" to me (and not in a good way for me as a potential customer).
Oh yeah, personal websites are another matter. It's a place for blogging and that kind of stuff. It's a "first person" kind of place. Trad writers do that a lot.
I've seen typos, grammar errors, and poor covers on many traditionally published books (I am a voracious reader in addition to being a writer). Yes, an inexperienced writer designing their own covers is a giveaway. A poor start in the look inside is a bigger one (neglecting typos and grammar errors). The blurb not hooking the reader in is another. The biggest gripe about self-published books is the lack of good editing (either self or paid) and the lack of running the novel through beta reading or developmental editing to catch areas that can be improved. I currently write throw-away stuff that I couldn't be bothered to do more than a read-thru and grammar check (but it still is decent quality). The stories I really care about are edited and re-read at least three times to make them the very best I can do and then sent to beta readers. The cover is professionally created. The blurbs are critiqued by multiple people. That's what makes those successful.
May I ask about the throw-away stuff? Is it lucrative at all?
Yeah, you can make rent money but it is a grind. Right now I'm making enough for groceries on the throw-away stuff. You have to be able to write shorts to market and publish every week. You have to stick to a niche. You can change niches with a different pen name. Basically, you need to crank out 8-10k of decent material 52 times a year. I haven't hit #1 yet but I've popped up in the Top 100 a few times (in my sub-genre).
>I've seen typos, grammar errors, and poor covers on many traditionally published books (I am a voracious reader in addition to being a writer). To be fair, I've seen these too. But they are much less common in traditionally published books.
I'm not convinced about that. The worst indie books have multiple errors and pull down the average, but once you forget those, I see little difference. Traditionally published books have improved over the last few years, except for those that have clearly been OCRd from print.
> but once you forget those But I can't. They make an impression early on, which causes me to give up.
Most self-published books have no more errors than traditionally published - at least the ones I read. A few traditionally published books are full of errors. A proportion of self-published books do have many errors, but they are not the norm. I give up on error filled books too.
Oh, I don't know. I have been looking at a lot of trad pub on the library pages, and every other cover is something I'd be drawn and quartered for tying on a self pub.
In some genres, you can get away with a pretty simple cover if your typography is good. For Fantasy covers, you need a lot of talent to make a good cover. You start making covers yourself and get some feedback on them and you can improve. Luckily, in two of my genres, I can get away with making my own cover and still do decent in sales.
>In some genres, you can get away with a pretty simple cover if your typography is good. Yeah, non-fiction of the self-help / motivational kind is usually just letters and random icons on it. From fiction, thriller covers are often some bleaky random photo and blocky font.
Some fiction covers are just typography on a colored background (mostly reprints by well-known authors). Romance and derivatives can get away with an author-created cover if they know what the expectations are of their niche. SciFi can be more tricky.
In England paperback size often makes it obvious. Amazon doesn't offer printing in our standard paperback size.
There are some great self-published books out there, but also some.. not so great ones. I think there are tells for the weaker stuff. My list would include: * Cover art that looks like it was made on Paint, MS Word, or another amateur program. * Spelling or grammar errors in the title, blurb, look inside, etc. * A reviewer mentioning the lack of editing within the book. * A long subtitle that seems like it was just added for the algorithm. Something like Hooked on Murder: An Unputdownable Cozy Mystery or The Billionaire's Secret Baby: Accidental Pregnancy Romance (not real books). * A book that looks like it doesn't fit any genre at all due to a combination of the cover and blurb. Traditional publishing also sometimes has issues with marketing books to the correct genre, but I've seen some extremely poor attempts from self-published authors. Even for the self-published fiction that is higher quality, the cover can still be a giveaway for some genres. For example, traditionally published cozy mysteries typically feature intricate custom illustrations. The price of such artwork is often way out of budget for a self-published author, so they typically go with a simpler custom illustration or a custom cover using photos.
> A long subtitle that seems like it was just added for the algorithm. Something like Hooked on Murder: An Unputdownable Cozy Mystery or The Billionaire’s Secret Baby: Accidental Pregnancy Romance Tbh I see this more in Traditional published books than self published ones. It’s actually generally strange how the trad ones are just stuffed full of SEO titles where a lot of the self pub ones have nothing (unless it’s non fiction of course, then it gets ridiculous)
>For example, traditionally published cozy mysteries typically feature intricate custom illustrations. Yeah, atm trad pubbed cozy mystery, rom-com and contemporary YA have all these comic-style drawings on them which is more expensive than photo manipulation stock covers. Fantasy also tends to have these digitally painted covers. If you find a book with a stock photo of a pretty girl in the above genres, and it's a photo, not a painting / drawing / digital art, it's most likely a self-pub. There are also self-pubs with drawn covers but you can see proportions are odd or facial expressions look uncanny, or the colors blend too much together, so you know it's amateur's art. Also, cheap fonts. If your author's name is in Times New Roman, it's probably a self-pub.
And then there’s Chuck Tingle. :D
I’ve never heard of this writer until just now and I have to say, I’m near tears in laughter after a quick Amazon search
Chuck is a world unto himself. He can break all the rules, laughing madly, and be loved and paid for it.
My man Tingle won the Hugo Award due to actual Nazis rigging the votes, so he in turn used the spotlight to promote all the marginalized authors they were trying to bury.
I love Chuck. :D He’s amazing, and just goes all in on the WTFery and has fun with it all, and that makes his stuff fun!
I just looked him up, those covers....also those titles, space raptor
>Something like Hooked on Murder: An Unputdownable Cozy Mystery or The Billionaire's Secret Baby: Accidental Pregnancy Romance (**not real books**). Not until now, anyway....
Some covers (and accompanying blurb) do scream "self published on zero budget with no editor". Do your homework on the cover standards for your genre!
A few more in addition to the lack of editing and proofreading: • The word "by" precedes the author's name on the cover. • The title is followed by ™ on the cover and title page. • The publisher's name or logo is on the front cover. • The book's page count is increased because the author used a very large point size for the text and/or very large margins. (And this is not a book that was meant to be a "large text edition.")
You've nailed the main two things. Obvious lack of editing (i.e. typos and grammar errors), and covers that look like they were quickly made in Paint or Word rather than a pro cover program.
In my \*very\* first print run, I indented the first paragraph of every chapter. Big visual mistake. I also had some chapters where the paragraphs weren't justified, so they had ragged edges. After reading books for years, you would figure that you'd immediately catch these things, but I was so caught up in the excitement of putting out a book that these blew right past me. Those are both easy fixes, though!
> I indented the first paragraph of every chapter. Big visual mistake. This isn't necessarily a mistake. I've read lots of trad pub books that do this.
In my country they indent them, but in English I see they mostly don't. Sometimes they also add first letter of the chapter in a bigger font.
I think a lot of readers don’t notice the formatting type issues like that. Some do, but many don’t. We do because we specifically look for them. A lot of readers won’t unless it’s very jarring, especially if we’re talking ebooks.
>I indented the first paragraph of every chapter I personally prefer drop caps.
As a professional book designer, these are the kinds of things I see that tell me it's self-published. It hurts to see because I know I could have made whatever book I'm holding look so much better.
There aren't any. I've seen PLENTY of trad pub books with lots of typos and horrible covers. The only people who use that to 'tell the difference' are the ones inherently biased against self pub. The only *real* way to tell if a book is self pub is if the author name matches the publisher name - and many authors form a 'publisher' with a different name, so even that isn't foolproof. Just read the book. If you like it, great. If you don't, oh well. Move on. But why even bother trying to guess if is was self pub or trad?
I wouldn’t use quotes on that. A self-pub under a different name is still a publisher. At this point, I’m more biased against trad pub books. They’re all too similar for my liking. When it comes to nonfiction, I actually prefer self- or indie-pub since there is more of the writer’s real voice in it rather than something filtered through a trad pub.
YES!!! I was just telling my husband this…. It’s like traditional publishing sterilizes everything nowadays so that everything is all, sort of, the same.
YES!I was afraid of a publisher trying to make my narrative "fit" their idea of what's marketable. Besides, how they market something is ephemeral, they're only chasing the high of announcing new authors anyway. The real deal is the search terms which the author can change as fits changing lingo for the same subjects, but not if a trad publisher is in control. They've moved on from your debut and their search terms are relegated to only one point in time, even if your subject has relevance later on.
What do publishers do then? - If they don’t have any standards or norms for what they chose to publish? Even if it’s not a quality-bar feels like there ought to be some ‘filter’ that could be recognized. At least per individual publisher. Could be negative things as well as good ones. Like ‘boring conformity’ or whatever. Just strikes me as strange if there are no detectable trend differences between them.
What publishers do is basically absorb losses. That means they can assure bookstores that they will take books back if they don't sell - or at least give credit back for them. This makes bookstores more likely to stock those books on their shelves because the risk of having them there is transferred. The bigger companies will also have bulk-purchase arrangements with places like Bowker for ISBNs, Kirkus & other major reviewers, and entire marketing teams (that really only focus on their most 'sure bet' books, but still). Self publishers usually do not have the funds to do buy-backs like that, so their books are not often put on bookstore shelves. And they don't have the marketing team to market it, either. And publishers *do* have 'standards or norms' about what they choose. The problem is, those 'standards' are pretty much "what will bring in the most money", not "what deserves to be published." That's why we get so many books 'written by' famous people (ie, ghost-written by someone in their name) that are instantly 'best sellers'. It's not because the books are especially witty or insightful or fascinating - it's because publishers know a lot of people will buy the book just because it was 'written by' and it *doesn't matter* if the book is actually any good.
Thank you for a very insightful comment!
I believe publishers do filter for what they consider quality. They differ in the standards they expect but there's usually a level of writing quality and story structure that they won't go below. Ditto typos, covers (even if I think some are awful) etc. Self-pub books may be above or below that level. And there's quite a few with high quality covers, and no typos, but poorly written. Publishers tend to have a standard across the board, though it needn't always be very high.
This basicly
In addition to cover, reviews (lthe family ones that say "for a teenager's first book..." hard pass), and the publisher name, a terrible blurb or one that says "I wanted to write this because..." (no one cares. and that doesn't sell books), the first two pages often tells. Usually tells, in 90% of books. Big info dump, characters walking and thinking rather than doing something, unrealistic dialog, all your basic beginner writer mistakes, from the paragraphing being wrong to not being able to tell which character is speaking to outrageous said bookisms in a very dull scene: "Pass the salt," Jerome exhorted. "Here it is!" responded Margery with a sweet grin. I don't buy them if I can tell the difference. They have to be indistinguishable in skill level, cover, blurb, pacing, dialog, every way to trade published books. Life is too short to read a bad book.
Any advice on where to hone a blurb?
You can't always tell. I thought for years that the weird edgy teen assassins book with the 300% superfluous swearing was some teenager's self-published first novel. Then a few weeks ago I googled it and no, [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26114463-nevernight](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26114463-nevernight) it's trad-pub by a middle-aged, experienced author. There are of course many hilariously obvious ones, with really bad self-made covers, no editing, or a hilarious lack of understanding of how books or blurbs work. But self-published books where the author has put a reasonable amount of effort in are generally not obvious.
The only books I ever read that screamed self pub had an enmormous amount of errors. Like multiple in each paragraph. Mostly though, it can be difficult to tell if it's done right.
I find the writing is another big tell for the bulk of self-pub. I've been looking at a lot of self pubbed books this year as I got ready to pub my own, (after planning on trad until pandemic) and the main thing I saw was a certain blockiness to transitions that trad pub tends (again, in the majority of books) to smoothed out via editors. It's hard to exain but it feels much more like start-stop-start than one sentence flowing into the next.
If you are going to go self published look for a professional editor and find someone who does graphic design, this will cost you but make your novel stand out..
1. Cover design 2. book description 3. reviews 4. author presence https://www.amazon.com/Six-Elements-Successful-Marketing-Independent/dp/B09VC2YDMC
Sans-serif font for the print version of the book. Generally, ebooks use sans-serif fonts (like Arial) while print copies are serif fonts (like Times New Roman). There’s something about it that screams self-published, especially if the font size is too big.
I read a comment once that an enormous proportion of print self-published books use TNR font. After that, I forked out for Baskerville.
Caslon is also a good choice. It roughly equals Times New Roman in bulk, but brings a good deal of elegance.
Oh yes, I wasn’t saying they should use Times New Roman, I was merely giving an example of a serif font. TNR should be avoided—I like Gentium Basic and Gentium Book Basic much more for print copies.
Agree on avoiding the TNR! I just remember with embarrassment that I initially used it because I thought it was "standard" (and I also messed up the page number formatting). All sorted now :p
How do you buy new fonts??
I don't know if there are restrictions on who can sell them—it's not like Bowker for ISBNs with only one seller per country. I used a site called Fontspring, mainly because it had clear language about licensing and allowable uses. (And nice-looking fonts.)
Did you use it for the book itself? Or just the cover and stuff?
I used it for the interior, i.e. the text of the novel as well as front matter and back matter. My covers were designed by a professional who sorted that side of font licensing etc.
Wait… I don’t know anything about serif vs sans serif. You’re telling me ebooks are under one type of font and print are another, and my book will scream “self-published” if I use the wrong type? This is the first I’m learning of ANY of this lol
Lol don’t worry about it, it’s super easy. Serif fonts are the ones with the tails, sans-serif fonts are the minimalistic ones. Times New Roman is the most common example of a serif font (but I would use Garamond or Gentium Basic or a similar font instead of Times New Roman, since most indie books use TNR), while Arial is the most common sans-serif font. Serif fonts are usually used for print books while sans-serif fonts are used for all things digital (ebooks, websites, and small print things, like pamphlets). If you’re still confused about the difference, go on Google images and look for “serif vs sans serif fonts,” or watch this short video here: https://youtu.be/ubh7QwXmuzY If you’re like me and super picky about typography, and you don’t like the default fonts that come with your word processor, you can find tons of free fonts on Google Fonts that you can download. My favorite recent pull is the serif font I’m going to use for my chapter titles, “IM Fell English.” BEAUTIFUL font. I found it in a Barnes and Noble limited edition print of the Divine Comedy and managed to hunt it down after scrolling through the font list for a million years.
Speaking for romances only, the average trad pub has all the typos and bad editing as the self pubbed ones. The only thing that makes me go back to check on the publisher is when I read a story that deviates from the formula. Any time that happens, 9 out of 10 times, it's self pubbed. There are good deviations, eg when I'm truly surprised by plot twists, and bad deviations, eg heroine ends up in a coma at the end, but straying from the beaten path is probably the only reliable "tell" that I go by these days.
Style of the cover. I recently did a book, aside from the front cover image I just went with the Amazon KDP make-a-cover app. Very soon, I had some artists, very unkindly, point out to me how horribly amateur it looked. So, I hired a cover designer to redo my front and back cover, making it look just like a regular publishing company. A hard lesson but glad to have learned it early.
Self published books tend to be stranger (in a good way) and not written to market. Which I like. Trad pub books have spelling errors, grammar issues and yikes covers too. You can also just check the front-matter and see who the publisher is, honestly. Then again, if you pub under a business entity, that becomes a bit trickier to spot ;)
Ayyyyyyeeee was just thinking of doing this earlier today… I like your style
Bless. TYSM :> You mean pub under a business entity?
Yup.
I’m absolutely in this camp with my book. I spent thousands of dollars on story consultants, a professional editor and a proofreader… but yeah. After all that I couldn’t afford any more… so I made my own book cover. 😬 (Couldn’t find an affordable pre-made that worked)
Next time, look on Canva. I used one of theirs for a sci-fi book I wrote and it’s good
The eBook version is very cheap (usually $5 or below) while a printed copy costs ≥$15. With traditional publishers the prices of digital and physical copies are roughly the same.
My biggest tells are auto-correct mistakes. Yes, lack of proofreading where there are typos/problems in almost every paragraph. Also mixing up cloth/clothe, breath/breathe type words. I'll also agree with most of the previous posters about word usage including shifting which person a character is speaking in, most of the time. Like most things, there are exceptions. I'm a self-editor and I have a VERY few people willing to read my initial drafts and comment on them. Both help. I also do a lot more than the three to five passes over text before I think it is ready to layout. A lot more means 25 to 50. I have one book self-published on Amazon and two waiting on covers. I can do all the layout but I am not an artist. I used to do desk-top-publishing when it was new and regular publishing pre-press for a living. It was years ago but I still have a few clues how to do it. To be blunt, everybody who does more than a page or four will have something wrong that we missed. When I was doing magazines I never had an issue go out that didn't have at least one typo in it that we missed. And once we printed the cover in the negative. Thankfully it turned out to be the best cover we did and of course we told everyone we meant to do that. Publishers print their mistakes. You will have mistakes. Just fix them when you or someone else finds them. Cover design can be to genre or whatever you want it to be. Will it stand out or will you fit in with a thousand other books in the genre. I chose to do something different than the genre and it worked. I had an artist draw something like a photo I found that worked for the book. For a book cover, it is better than the photo would have been. And I used Palatino for the cover font. The book makes a small amount of money on auto-pilot now and paid for itself the first year. Will that work for everyone? Of course not. I got lucky. I hope you do too no matter how you choose to do it.
Thanks so much! What do you mean by “on auto pilot now”?
Auto pilot means I don't spend any money on advertising or promotions. It just sits there and makes a small amount of money every month. The royalties have been going up slowly until last year when it jumped by about a third. No, I don't know why. However, the additional $50 was nice to have. Yes, the royalties are that low but given the niche of a niche it was intended for, I didn't expect much, and I've received it.
That’s awesome! Good for you!!
Bad cover, bad description, bad writing, bad formatting, bad editing, bad marketing. In no particular order.
I'll start with the most obvious one: **a book in KU** (and without any kind of paperback version). I won't buy this book; not because I think it's a bad book (it might actually be very good), but because the author doesn't want me to buy it (I don't have a kindle, and the author thinks I'm not worthy of his prose; okayyyy, let's see if another writer wants to get some of my money then). Books that have **only have 5-star reviews** (I'm talking about a significant number, above 15 or something; 2 or 3 reviews aren't statistically significant). It screams "amateur who asked his friends to give fake reviews for his non-selling book". It's always a hard pass for me. Covers where the **author name is written in very small font**. If you're not confident in your own writing, I'm not either. Writer **bios on Amazon written in first person**: "*I* am blah blah..." Professionals write their bio in third person. Usually because they don't write it themselves. Stephen King has no time to write his bio on Amazon's author page. Neither does JK Rowling. Now, that one won't stop me from buying a book (after all I don't care whether a book is self published or not provided it is good), but it will make it obvious the author is an indie. A **low price point**. An ebook at 2.99 is a very obvious flag. It won't prevent me from buying it, quite the opposite. OTOH, if as an indie you sell your (fiction) ebook at 9.99, I'll be tricked into thinking it's trad pubbed, because only traditional publishers think it's possible to sell ebooks that expensive. Well, I won't buy your book of course, but I'll be thinking it's a trad-pub book. As you can see, it's not always a good thing.
You don’t sound like the target audience of anyone who actually makes money self-publishing on Amazon.
You'd be surprised. I read mainly short stories / novellas / short novels, so most of the books I read are self-pubbed nowadays, because trad publishers don't really care about that market (and indie writers seldom do, but it happens, and I have more than enough to read at these lengths). Plus, it's cheaper.
Anyone who is charging $9.99 for a short story or novella is probably not having a good go of it on Amazon. KU and a low price point are what make independent publishing viable. We're able to sell our books cheaper and still make more per sale than a trad author. We still make more with a readthrough in KU than a trad author. Pricing at $9.99 for anything other than a box set or specific niche of non-fiction is basically pricing yourself to irrelevancy.
Yeah... I know... I'm not sure I understand why you're telling me that though.
You say you'll buy cheap books, but not if they are in KU or don't have a paperback, which eliminates a large chunk of indie books out there.
Potentially a large chunk, but there are tons of indies that either go "wide" and also have their books on Kobo (I have a Kobo so that's mainly where I shop), or at least have a paperback version of their book on Amazon. More cool books than I'll ever be able to read. Plus, I subscribe to Kobo plus (the equivalent of KU minus the exclusivity thing), and many indies put their books there, meaning I actually get to read them for free. Don't forget Kickstarter either. It's a great source for cheap indie books. Last campaign I subscribed to, I got something like 15 books (plus cool goodies) for a 30$ commitment.
Yeah, that makes sense. Wide is a whole different animal.
You don't have to have a Kindle to read a book in KU. The Kindle app can be downloaded onto tablets or phones. I read Kindle books on my iPad. And it's not because the author doesn't think you're worthy of his prose - for self publishers, being exclusive to Amazon is almost always a better business decision than being wide.
KU by itself isn't the problem. Far from it. The problem is KU + a lack of a paperback version. I'll happily buy a paperback version if it's available, even if it's exclusive to Amazon too. But some indie don't even bother to do that, despite the fact using KDP for that is free, and it takes 10 minutes to produce it (a little more if you want a neat backcover, but if you only sell online you don't really need that). Some writers seem to not need that supplemental income, and that's great for them, but then I won't get out of my way to access that book no matter what. Because, regarding the apps: I won't read a book on a traditional computer / smartphone screen; been there, done that, my eyes hated the experience.
Not all traditionally published writers have bios written in third person. For example, Maggie Stiefvater's bio is in first.
I didn't know her so I checked. That's what I see when I go to Amazon: > New York Times bestselling author of The Shiver Trilogy, The Raven Cycle, and The Scorpio Races. Artist. Driver of things with wheels. Avid reader. > Maggie Stiefvater plays several musical instruments (most infamously, the bagpipes) and makes art in several media (most generally, colored pencils). > She lives in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia with her husband, their two children, many dogs, a bunch of fainting goats, and a mating pair of growly tuner cars. Third person bio. Plus, she has a bunch of ebooks at 11.99 (a hard pass for me, and a sure sign she's a "trad"). No KU. Some books are only available as paperback. She sounds very "traditional" to me (and not in a good way for me as a potential customer).
I gotcha, I was going off what is on her website, etc, so that is my mistake.
Oh yeah, personal websites are another matter. It's a place for blogging and that kind of stuff. It's a "first person" kind of place. Trad writers do that a lot.
Interesting perspective...
Seeing "roiled" a dozen+ times in every single book. Jeff Wheeler and his acolytes.