Fast Company has an article about an ESPN contributor who collaborated with Vook to release a Jeremy Lin book in 6 days. It also touches on the fact that there are now 7 Kindle books about Jeremy Lin (a basketball player for the New York Knicks who’s seeing Tim Tebow levels of hysteria) available in the Kindle Store.
Looking at one Jeremy Lin ‘book’
The Book: Linsanity: The Improbable Rise of Jeremy Lin.
- The Price: $1.99.
- The Genre: Capitalizing on Lin.
- Turnaround Time: 6 days.
- Length: 15,000 words.
- Pros: Quick Turnaround Time, Releasing it while Lin mania is still going on.
- Cons: See Rest of the Post.
The most appalling part to me personally:
72 hours to write a 15,000-plus-word manuscript, 36 hours for the fine folks at Vook to build the e-book, and then another 24 hours for them to arrange the distribution.
Apparently, getting out something/anything fast is the new aim of publishing. The people at Vook don’t seem to realize that boasting about publishing a book written in 72 hours isn’t exactly the best way to convey quality or ’worth your money and time’.
Let’s think about it for a minute.
- This ‘book’ was written in 72 hours. It’s very short at 15,000 words – but 72 hours is an insanely short amount of time to write something good. You have to assume that the quality wouldn’t be anywhere near something that took a few months or a few years to write.
- Could an author even ‘think out’/'plan’/'structure’ a book in 72 hours?
- No mention of editing or proof-reading. Perhaps they think it isn’t important enough to mention.
- The book cover is pretty bad. A 5 minute search on Google?
- 36 hours to build the ebook. Wonder what quality formatting was done.
- 24 hours to get to people. This is impressive.
- Six days from concept to store.
The Wildcard: 6 other people managed to publish Jeremy Lin books (and probably in similar periods of time, given that Linsanity is just a few weeks old).
Quality Control and Curation
So … we have 7 Jeremy Lin books floating around the Kindle Store. All written in 72 hours or so. Most probably not edited or proof-read. How wonderful.
The first casualty is quality. If you’ve managed to get your book written in 3 days, and published 1.5 days after that – What sort of quality of writing or thought can readers expect?
The second casualty is the possibility of curation (letting readers know which is the best choice). A few weeks after Jeremy Lin burst on to the scene, there are already 7 books about him available. Which one do readers choose?
Additionally, absolutely anyone, including one of those chess-playing dogs, is free to write a book and publish it. Which means the number of choices will keep increasing.
The good thing about ebooks is that absolutely anyone can publish ebooks. The bad thing about ebooks is that absolutely everyone is publishing ebooks.
Do readers really want books written in 72 hours?
Who knows.
It’s an interesting thought. Do readers want books written in 72 hours? Would they be OK? What if Stephen King wrote something in 72 hours?
The reality is that now anyone can write books and publish them. All the limitations are gone – so, if an author thinks a book written in 72 hours is worth publishing, he publishes it.
We readers have to choose between all these books. A book that an author might have mulled over for years and polished and refined. A book that took 72 hours to write. They all get equal virtual shelf space. Apart from reviews and labels like Publisher Names – there’s not really any way to distinguish.
Reading the Linsanity book right now … well, let’s just say it’s pretty clear it was written in 72 hours.
It’s just sad. You expect people to be artists in their work and put in effort and love and pain into their work. Now we’re in some sort of caricature world where people boast about writing a book in 72 hours.
That’s just a lack of respect for readers. For Reading. For Books.
Filed under: publishing Tagged: | ebooks, quality
It’s an interesting thought. Do readers want books written in 72 hours?
I won’t read another Dan Brown book because his grammatical errors offend me.
I enjoy the films based on Tom Clancy’s novels, but I would never read another. Not after throwing one of his books down the garbage chute after I got to page 10.
Steven King has told us how he writes in his On Writing. So that question is not relevant.
Hemingway said that the first draft is crap and most prolific writers deliberately write the first draft with the object of doing an uncensored brain dump.
So presenting a reader with a 72 hour book is…, well just like handing your reader crap.
I think Hemingway hit the nail on the head.
I couldn’t agree with you more. Taking it further, I’m not all that crazy about books that are considered ‘page burners.’ What happened to books that value the reader’s ability/need/desire to contemplate and mull over ideas? Books that one is only able to read a chapter at a time because the ideas put forth require digestion and thought. I think these are becoming rarer and rarer, but are probably the more valuable.
I’m on board with you and Jen Jones. 72 hours, and then to tell the potential buyers how little effort was put into the book? Wow.
Friends in the publishing industry have told me they hate to see the first of every year roll around because they know they’re going to be flooded with novels completed during NaNoWriMo. Novels that writers are so excited about mainly because they have completed them in a timely enough fashion (or were able to fake it well enough) to enable them to get a little digi-ribbon saying that they are nothing if not prolific. And, now that that masterpiece is actually in black and white, they think it’s ready to start sending to agents and publishing houses, along with the note that they actually wrote this breathtaking piece of fabulousness in Just A Month. Can you imagine how many eBooks are “out there” already that were written in a push just to get the correct number of words written in the allotted amount of time? And then published in e-format with little or no ‘real’ editing done. (Having your friend’s cousin’s maid’s uncle read it and tell you whether he thinks it’s ready or not doesn’t count! Unless Uncle George makes a living reading and editing.) Once upon a time, those novels would have been sent back with polite (or not so) rejection notices, but now, thanks to Amazon, those pieces of “fast craft” are published right alongside blood, sweat and tears pieces of work that writers actually spent time and money on to get them as near perfect as possible before submitting. The one thing that writers didn’t need was more competition. I love my Kindle. And I love love love getting freebie books for it…and I’m all for free enterprise and watching indie writers pulling ahead of the pack…but I kinda liked the good old days when you could actually be proud that your book had been published and was on a shelf somewhere because experts in the field said it was “good enough.” Not just getting bragging rights because you write real good on sumthing that peeps wanna reed. And u are faast too. *sigh*
But …
Weekly magazines and daily newspapers regulalry include articles of this length and longer – and some of them are well researched, well structured, professionally edited and worth the investment of time in reading them.
The starting point is that they have an organisational structure built around these types of timescales and they come from the pen of a writer or writers already very familiar with the background material.
I believe the problem of how to choose what is worth reading is the major problem in this emerging world – I don’t believe the timescales per se are the issue. They just make a media splash – which is, on review, a pretty meaningless one.
We are living through a major hiatus in the publishing industry – I have faith that the market will find a way to enable people to distinguish between safe purchases and riskier ones. Maybe we need certification marks from e-book sellers “guaranteed proofead” or “guaranteed edited” to get past the surface quality issues.
As to finding a way to assure the quality of the content – I don’t see the solution other than market feedback – and I’m not sure that anything more wouldn’t be a censorship by another name.
all good points.
Glorified articles published as books are still pollution. And the obvious glee in sending out something unpolished is strange.
Fiction, as mentioined by several commenters, and a non-fiction essay (novella, short-story, etc.) are two very different things.
It sounds like the book is really just an expanded sports article, something like what you would see in the paper or in a magazine. I’m guessing that journalists are used to churning out material like this on a regular basis.
The thing is he’s trying to get the best of both worlds.
Put in the effort of a sports article. That’s usually free to read in a paper or on a site.
Sell if for $1.99 as a book and call it a ‘book on Jeremy Lin’.
adding a phrase to your comment:
“That’s usually free to read in a paper or on a site” and then thrown away.
