Why Self-Published Novels Often Miss the Mark

The curse of the premature author

Self-published novels. There are tons of them. There is an estimated four million books sold each year in the US alone, and three million of those are self-published. That's all books, mind, not only novels. Still, it's a lot. The sad fact is, the majority of these self-published novels will miss the mark entirely in satisfying their intended audience. There can be many reasons for this: lack of marketing skills, including not understanding who the target audience is, how to reach them, or even how to design a cover that will appeal to them. There's also the reality that reading as an entertaining pastime is dropping off the scale like never before in the fiercely competitive attention industry.

One aspect that is a major let down, no matter how good the marketing or design, is the product itself. Poorly written, disastrously executed and cringingly trite stories can only undermine a novel's sales, dashing the author's dreams of being a respected and renown artist.

Of course, these books will always exist - there's no way of preventing that, and I'm not trying to sound mean, just realistic. However, for anyone truly serious about publishing their own novels, they have to understand that their best marketing tool is to produce a quality product in the first place. Quality results in reputation, and reputation results in sales. Yes, there are outliers like Fifty Shades of Grey - and there are lessons to learn from that as a case study on writing to the satisfaction of the intended audience, and effective marketing on a shoestring - but this is not the norm, generally speaking. And I'm certainly not suggesting that writers shouldn't self-publish. It's just that too many do so prematurely without running the gauntlet to good literary practices. They embark on their endeavours without equipping themselves with the essential tools of the trade. There are far too many writers out there who believe they do not need to abide by writing 'rules', do not need to learn anything, and yet poor quality self-published books far outweigh the good stuff, so I would argue that this is proof these people are wrong. There's no point being a rebel without a cause, which is what this notion amounts to, in the hope of skipping over the hard work and rising to success based on raw talent alone. I'll blog about the talent vs training debate some other time.

In any case, my view is that there are no rules, only tools. Techniques. In much the same way as a blacksmith learns which tools and implements are best used for different types of tasks within smithery, the developing writer must learn when to melt, smelt, cast, file and polish their material, in what order, and how the different techniques achieve the desired final outcome.

Without doing this, the average self-published author would be more suitably termed the premature author, for they have arrived before they are ready. This isn't helped by the vanity press industry actively encouraging budding writers to part with their hard-earned cash on a disingenuous business model, encouraging the notion that there is no barrier for entry.

But there is a barrier, and that barrier is quality. So, let's look at the main areas that lets a book down when this barrier is bypassed.