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Comment by m463 | Hacker News Reader

I have found kindle books that come from a reputable publisher are MUCH higher quality than self-published books.

I just don't think many self-published books have the meaningful rejection, editing and proofreading that a publisher provides.

That doesn't mean that there aren't good self published books. And things might change over time, if teams form. I think publishing a book requires a team.

Meaningful reviews and awards might also help separate the wheat from the chaff.

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Because reputable publishers noticed that people were still buying the self-published ebooks in spite of the lack of solid copyediting or quality typesetting, reputable publishers, too, are starting to cut back on such things.

I am a translator who occasionally translates literature for some big-name publishers, and I find that the onus is sort of on me now to ensure a high-quality final product, because the publisher no longer provides a real hands-on editor to work on the manuscript after me, only a young and inexperienced (and sometimes downright lazy) copyeditor/proofreader.

Quality control is a common good in retail markets. In a healthy market, consumers don't care about top quality from medium quality. They might even go for low quality if it's marketed well. Only the "pro" consumers or hobbyists care about these differences.

So there is profit to be made in price and quality race to the bottom. When the quality drops across the board those uncaring customers just leave the market. This has caused crises in other industries before. They don't care until they're gone, with the passionate hobbyist canaries leaving early.

On the other hand, I like these self-published books, because they can stray from the norm. A lot of published works end up following a similar formula, which is less likely to be the case in self-published works.

This is where meaningful reviews/awards would be required.

There is too much dreck to wade through to find that genre-bending gem.

I used to be open to self-published, in the hope of more great books to read. After years of intense disappointment at so many poorly written self-published novels, or in desperate need of a good editor, I simply avoid them now. If it doesn't have a publisher I'm rarely willing to risk the waste of time and money any more.

For all their faults publishers seem able to bring a worthwhile quality floor. Sure there's been the odd exception in each direction.

I hope I don't get roasted for this; but I whole-heartedly agree. There's also a sizeable publisher that I find has remarkably poor editorial control, and so I hesitate to read works published by them: Tor.

Which is strange; they've always been a source of pulp science fiction and fantasy, but I enjoy such works and have enjoyed Tor works in the distant past. But recently? Notsomuch.

Isn’t pulp fiction by definition low quality?

Pulp fiction just means works published in pulp magazines or similarly disreputable publications. Some was bad, some was great. Many acclaimed authors wrote for the pulps:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulp_magazine#Authors_featured

In your very own link it says the term is used to refer to "run-of-the-mill, low-quality literature".

Pulp is, by definition, material printed in cheap wood pulp magazines.

Pulp is, by association, low-quality writing.

Pulp is also, by allusion, a particular genre/structure mirroring the dominant topics and styles of the original magazines - regardless of its quality.

You aren't wrong. Even if the content if good, even great, with incredibly rare exception, you really, really need a good editor to turn that content into something useful.

It's the same in the record business. See "The Wrecking Crew" about how the studio musicians turned the raw material of the artists into hits. (Often the original bands could neither sing nor play their instruments very well.)

On the other hand, I loved The Murderbot Diaries from Tor.

Having a good community also helps to separate the good books from others. I mostly read fantasy and the community on reddit is so good to get recommendations, participate in polls, interact with authors, etc. There's also a yearly contest where 300 self published books are reviewed by bloggers. Here's a recent poll [1] and here's a somewhat older thread for recommendations [2]

I got a Kindle Unlimited subscription this year and some of my favorite series are:

* Cradle by Will Wight

* Arcane Ascension by Andrew Rowe

* Heartstrikers by Rachel Aaron

* Worm by Wildbow (I'm counting webserials as self published too)

* The Sword of Kaigen by M.L. Wang

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/cwz83u/the_rfantas...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/7lib3d/what_are_so...

I'll add Ra by Sam Hughes (qntm.org) https://www.amazon.com/Sam-Hughes/e/B07M92WWT7/ref=dp_byline...

Reputable publications put out less than 1% as many books as are self published, and they still spew a lot of terrible junk. Do you include say Tor etc as reputable? If not that percentage drops further.

What self publishing provides is a closer match for your personal interests. That’s only useful if you have unusual tastes, but I have personally given up on published fiction.

PS: What recent good reasonably hard science fiction can you name? Most people say The Martian, but that was originally self published.

"Children of Time" is fantastic and "Three Body Problem" is good. I haven't read the rest of the Three Body series but it seems popular.

I don’t want to argue about it specificity, but “Three Body Problem” is not particularly hard science fiction.

Bouncing a signal off the sun as a signal booster. Eleven-dimensional supercomputers called sophons which, when viewed in three dimensions, only occupy the volume of a proton. That’s a little out there.

IMO, people calling that Hard Science fiction shows how far from mainstream the idea is.

I agree, although you did say "reasonably" hard and it is popularly categorised as hard sci fi. The stuff about using entangled gigantic photons to manipulate signals to Earth was definitely absurd, but the discussion of the actual three body problem was more reasonable.

I dunno. I've never been a huge buff for the harder side of sci fi and Clarke novels seem to leave me cold, so maybe not the best judge of this.

It's the same kind of thing that happened with indie games and Steam. The barriers to entry have become so low that everyone who fancies themself an author can publish a book regardless of how bad it is. The net result is potentially more good books, but realistically finding the good ones has become really difficult because there are so many bad ones.

For me personally, the thing about self publishing is it gets authors noticed by actual publishers. Many of my favorite current authors started in self publishing but didn't stay there.

I can see how it seems that way (that self-publishing gets authors noticed by publishers), but it's actually pretty rare that it works out that way for any given writer. As I understand it, publishers generally don't look favorably upon a self-published author.. unless we're talking pre-published Andy Weir level numbers.

One counter example is “Harry Potter and the methods of rationality”. Possibly one of the best books I’ve ever read.

Another example is "Worm", which I learned of from the author's notes for Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality:

https://parahumans.wordpress.com/

Worm and it's sequel, Ward, are amazing.

Worm is 1.6 million words long?? You read the whole thing?

It was released as a serial. Think of it as a long series of shorter works.

You read a chapter. Then you read another chapter. Repeat as long as you manage to keep interest.

Worm is an awesome tale that have mostly destroyed other stories about super heroes for me.

Yep. About the same length as the Game of Thrones book series (ASOIAF)

Yeah, I think Worm really fits the HN crowd. It's a de- and re-construction of the superhero genre, with really creative superpowers. I love the world building in Worm, it's internally consistent which is something that gets hand-waved away in most superhero stories. It starts out as a sort of young-adult superhero story but slowly morphs and escalates to a sci-fi epic.

I really admire the work ethic of the author, he has been delivering high-quality chapters every week since 2011, and you can just read it online for free.

Wasn't that a serial fanfiction published over a pretty long period of time? I seem to remember reading the chapters weekly. Fanfiction like that tends to be its own category, with the better ones rising to the top of the rather large pile. Another example is Metropolitan Man.

Another example is the Wool series by Hugh Howey. That was one of the first big self-publishing success stories.

The books are incredibly entertaining and actually spawned a number of short stories and novels by other self-publishing authors set in the same universe.

I liked reading HPMOR and it's certainly among the best fan fictions I've read, but in my opinion it has all the usual benefits and shortcomings of fanfics: It's based on fascinating ideas and a new perspective on the known world and characters, it has an unconventional story that the author obviously tells in the way he wants.

On the other hand it shows a lack of editing. There are whole chapters that don't move the story forward (like a third of the book is dedicated to student battles that just seem like a filler before the author decided how to end the story). I feel like those would all get significantly shortened if this would be a published book with an editor.

Anyway, I like reading fanfiction, but I think it stands on its own and it's hard to compare it with conventional published literature.

I see what you mean but don't really agree, the chapters that do not move the story forward allow to dig into characters, to get a better image of the universe we're reading about. I enjoy reading it, so I appreciate it's here, it helps immersion as the book is not only a specific storyline.

I've always been frustrated in Harry Potter that there's not more writing about the lessons for example. There's quite a bit about it in the first book, then it's more and more scarce.

I believe it is probable that an independent individual would be able to provide a useful advice and interesting speculation on the subject of philosophy, psychology, ways of living etc. Everybody is exposed to significant amount of life experience and information and given just that + sufficient intelligence and a habit of analyzing that can come up with something interesting and useful.

At the same tile it probably is much less probable that an independent individual has writing skills necessary to produce a high-quality work of literature.

So we have to choose if we would like to limit our inputs by only considering well-written literature. I believe what I'm actually looking for has high chances of occurring outside that filter. Perhaps we should not insist on getting a pleasurable and a practically valuable reading at the same time.

The number of typos I see in traditionally published materials indicates that they don't add much value in the proofreading realm.

I've seen examples where they've deducted value especially when publishers' proofreaders are unfamiliar with obscure technical terms and mistake them for typos. This happens especially when changing a single letter would change the word from obscure to something relatively common; the meaning is of course not preserved.

Examples:

- in a novel about the Buddha, 'jhana' was changed to 'jnana'

- in an article about installing Linux, 'rawrite' (RawWrite) was changed to 'rewrite'

I saw that at the beginning with kindle books, and I gave lots of bad reviews.

I think as printed sales dropped off publishers would shovel older printed books into OCR and publish the results immediately.

Over time, the situation has got better. Many books I purchased years ago have updated versions available. I suspect it is because most of the valuable pre-digital books have been OCR'd and proofread, possibly by the customers.

Newer books were always digital and didn't suffer OCR problems.

I'm surprised Kindle doesn't have a "popular typos" like "popular highlights".

> I think publishing a book requires a team.

No, you just need better tools to do so. Of course, having humans reviewing your book can help increase the quality, but that has nothing to do with having a publisher.

> I have found kindle books that come from a reputable publisher are MUCH higher quality

You are also biased because there are a LOT of really bad books published by traditional publishers anyway.

I understand what you're saying, but I disagree.

Tools won't find plot holes, they won't find one-dimensional characters, they won't find pacing problems.

Having a publisher means someone cares about their reputation, that there are risks, that resources are devoted to quality.

To be clear, I'm not saying that self-publishing means you will get a terrible book.

It's just that self-publishing is inclusive, published books are exclusive, and that changes the statistics. It's hard to locate a good book in a sea of self-published books where there are no quality bars.

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