Leilanie Stewart

I read an article on The Guardian recently titled More are published than could ever succeed: are there too many books?

As an author who uses KDP myself, I know how straightforward it is to upload a Word document or PDF, making it simple for anyone who wants to publish a draft to become an author. It’s cheap too if you do the work yourself and avail of Amazon’s free ISBN option.

It’s easy to think, then, that the quality of self-published books flooding the marketplace would be of a lower standard; but I disagree. I’m not talking about ‘low content’ books here, such as notebooks or diaries, nor AI produced books, which are easy to spot once you get reading a few pages. I’m talking about novels, fiction and poetry collections.

Aside from books that I have been reading for the curriculum at work (GCSE and A-level English), the majority of books I have been buying on Kindle and paperback are self-published, for the simple reason that they are far more original and risk-taking than the often formulaic big-publisher books being released. On many an occasion, I have found myself putting big-publisher books back on the display in brick and mortar stores after reading the first couple of pages, mainly because I find the content safe and unoriginal. Safe and unoriginal gets monotonous after a while.

I suppose that if the market really is flooded by books, and if the majority of those are self-published, then that’s a good thing as they provide something different and unconventional. Without needing to honour a contract with a publisher, they can write what they want, and see how their books will be received by readers. A few of my favourite psychological fiction authors started out as indie published and on the basis of their books going viral, were picked up by big publishers; I have found that their recent books have more predictable and safer ‘money churning’ plots than they wrote when they were self-published.

Regarding quality, there is often no difference between self-published/print on demand and mass produced, as indie authors tend to hire editors and graphic designers, or learn how to do it professionally themselves. Another reason why I’ve been choosing to read more indie books lately.

I think what it comes down to is, since millions of books are published every year in an oversaturated market, the best way to try and stand out is to do something different, and most of all to stay true to your craft. The majority of us as authors will never make a living from it – the reality is that very few books go viral on social media – so we have to do what we can to make our books catch the eyes of readers.

And, on that note: readers! Please do review or even simply rate the books you read. It takes one second to click a star rating at the end of a Kindle, and you’ll be helping authors to match their books with other like-minded readers.