Author Richard Herley has started a new blog which aims to bring worthy ebooks to people’s attention. Here is what he says:
The hegemony of the traditional publishing industry is crumbling, and not before time. Who knows how many wonderful books have fallen victim to the faulty opinion of overworked and underqualified publishers’ readers? Who knows how many talented authors, worn down by unjust rejection, have simply given up?
Smashwords is central to the coming revolution in self-publishing: anyone can publish there. This is to be celebrated, but it raises a problem for readers in finding new authors producing work of quality. The process of manually searching Smashwords – navigating the site and viewing samples online – is necessarily time-consuming. Reviews are not always reliable.
As an author whose first novel was published in 1978, I have been around long enough to recognize good prose when I see it. When viewing a Smashwords sample, I look for the following:
* Talent
* Grammatical correctness
* An absence of typos and spelling errorsThe first is the most important, but the second and third reveal a professional attitude that augurs well for the whole book.
The function of this site is to highlight books that I believe merit investigation. A short, typical extract, usually from the beginning of the main text, is provided – just enough to give you a flavour. I do not have time to read every book in its entirety. My choice is based on random sampling and follow-ups from reviews I have seen. If you find that my taste does not coincide with yours, or that my recommendations lead nowhere, so be it.
