It’s All Over But The Reviewing - Self-Publishing Edition
I like Jane Smith. I know her just a little, cyber-socially and cyber-professionally as well. As it turns out, though, I haven’t been paying close enough attention. I knew she was extremely helpful. Her website, How Publishing Really Works, should be a mandatory stop on most everyone’s path to publication. But Jane is also running another blog, one that doesn’t try to convince writers not to self-publish. She doesn’t try to convince them to do it, either. Nor does she tell them how to go about doing it or not doing it. No, Jane likely realizes that there are plenty of pro-, con-, and how-to websites on the hotly debated topic of self-publishing, or its cousin, print-on-demand publishing.
What she’s done at, THE SELF-PUBLISHING REVIEW, is tucked a napkin under her chin and welcomed all self-published comers. She’s eating the proof that is the pudding and telling us how it tastes.
In a segment of the industry that’s evolving in leaps, I can’t imagine a more relevant yardstick than an honest reviewer, holding every aspect of these books to the same standards as their big-house counterparts. Jane Smith presses her expertise quite sharply to the weak points in everything from cover art to style, syntax, and story, but she never fails to praise where it’s earned.
After reading a number of her reviews with my coffee this morning, the overall picture for what’s out there in self-publishing is bleak-ish, but with a rise in the road up ahead. You get the feeling that, probably more in nuggets than veins, there just might be gold in them there hills.
AuthorScoop
June 6th, 2010 at 2:00 am
Jamie, thanks for this generous review: it’s much appreciated.
I began my little review site after realising how few self-published books I’d actually read. I wanted to remedy that; and I wanted to read a fair cross-section of the market, and not just the books which people were talking about, so this seemed the best way to do it.
In the course of my reviewing I’ve read some really terrible books but I’ve also read a couple of good ones, which gives me hope.
June 7th, 2010 at 9:12 am
[...] one more on book reviewing: It’s All Over but the Reviewing: Self-Publishing Edition from AuthorScoop. This is a brief recommendation of editor Jane Smith’s The Self-Publishing [...]