The self-published eBook bonanza

As a freelance writer for hire, I edit and proofread books. Recently, I landed my first eBook editing gig. It was for a fantasy novel best described as Harry Potter gone hip. Its destination: Smashwords.

As this writer hunted down typos, run-on sentences, grammar confusion and other glitches, a thought came: This was a novel slated for a specific niche audience. Indeed, eBooks have been quite popular in the fantasy genre. Romance has been another popular eBook genre as well. One worker at a Barnes & Noble even told me about an eBook author who had made thousands of bucks novels targeted at those two markets.

But a quick perusal of Smashwords alone reveals a multitude of self-published eBooks offered in everything from historical fiction to literary fiction to humor and much more. Fantasy and romance may make their do-it-yourself scribes big bucks, but they have hardly cornered the market.   

The sheer proliferation of them begs a question, however: Are there too many of them, which means the market risks saturation?  Will authors cancel each other out if too many self-published authors appear in eText? Hopefully not; the sheer flexibility ePublishing offers writers is an immense boost to authors freed from the need for literary agents; long waits for answers from publishers and enduring rejection slips in the mail.

However, ease of publishing is a double-edged sword: Books with poorly edited text can be unleashed on the market and rejected by readers as a result.  Before I worked my magic on the eBook in question, the text was sub-par at best. However, the book's author now has a chance now that the text is in order. If an author is taking the eBook route, and has trouble with editing their work, getting an editor or two would be well-worth the time and money. You may have left the rejection slips in the dust, but nothing stings worse than your book not selling because the text is not up to par! What is more, poorly written eBooks proliferating risk hampering the market worse than too many well-written ones competing for readers.

Image courtesy Wikimedia.