Do you buy self-published books? I do.
Back in 2010, April L. Hamilton addressed the bias against self-publication in her new book, “the indie author guide. self-publishing strategies anyone can use.” I believe that 16 years later, some of that bias still exists.
Are self-published books exercises in vanity? Are narcissistic, talentless, boring, insert-your-own-prejudice-here people just taking advantage of today’s desk-top publishing options and flooding the bookosphere with unimaginably bad books? Why, yes! I’m sure they are, and I’m sure they do. Some of them, anyway.
But some self-published books are really very good, and/or really very helpful.
The first self-published book I ever bought was written by Gilbert Barr, Jr.,”Me & Sarcoidosis: A Lifetime Partnership. A Patient’s Story About Living With A Chronic Health Condition.” I no longer own this book, I donated it to a community bookshelf several years ago. I don’t remember in what year that book was originally published, but you can buy a revised edition of it on Amazon, which was published in 2002.
I also bought “Living with Sarcoidosis and Other Chronic Health Conditions,” another book written by Gilbert Barr, Jr. It was published in 2004, the year I was diagnosed with Sarcoidosis.
These books were a life-saver! They provided information about a condition about which I could not find much information on the Internet in 2004. Social media was in its infancy; Facebook, one of the first major social networks, was founded in 2004. Today, if you type the word “Sarcoidosis” into the Amazon search function and limit your search to just the category of “books,” you’ll get several hundred search results. But back in 2004, information about Sarcoidosis was hard to come by.
Gilbert Barr, Jr., had been living with Sarcoidosis and other chronic illnesses for many years, and he actually died from Sarcoidosis-related conditions and cancer a few years later, in 2009. Both books were self-published on the iUniverse platform, but whereas Barr utilized an editor for his second book, which greatly improved its readability, he did everything himself for his first book.
And what a mess that first book was! “Me & Sarcoidosis: A Lifetime Partnership. A Patient’s Story About Living With A Chronic Health Condition” really could’ve used an editor. At the time, I remember thinking that he went off on too many tangents, spent too much time describing in excrutiating detail each little side effect of his medication and illnesses. When I read it for the first time, I thought, stop whining!
And then my own Sarcoidosis started acting up, and I ended up on steroids for eight years. Side-effects and complications, galore! I was so glad I’d bought the book, and re-read it several times in subsequent years. Yes, the book was an editorial mess. But it contained so much valuable, real-life information that I didn’t care. As my own journey started to resemble Barr’s, I was grateful that he’d shared his experiences in a book.
Can self-published books ever be as good as books published by (big) publishing houses? I guess that depends on how you define the word “good.” Sometimes, nothing can match real-life experiences, shared by real people, told in their own voices, written by themselves.
So here’s my advice to you, if you are thinking about self-publishing, but have doubts about your abilities as a writer: Do it !