How do you find reliably good cheap reads?
Today
we have a guest post by Tahlia Newland, an author
who writes magical realism & fantasy for young adults and adults.
Her first publication, A Matter of Perception, is
a diverse collection of thematically linked short stories, and her young adult
magical realism novella, Give
me a Break,, comes out in mid June.
Imagine
that you’ve just got an ereader and you’re looking for some cheap books to buy.
Maybe you’re a student, or simply on a tight budget, but books under $5 are
looking good, 99c and free books are looking even better, until you try a few.
It soon becomes clear that there are two kinds of free and 99c books,
·
those written
by authors of a professional standard who are providing a sample of their work
at a cheap price to encourage you to buy more of their writing. These come in
three forms,
o
a
short story as an advertisement,
o
the
first novel in a series, to get you hooked on the series,
o
a
stand alone novel where the author has more books available to purchase
o
a
limited time promotion of a single novel or collection of short stories to try
to raise the books ratings and hence its visibility to the browsing public.
·
those
written by authors who can’t get their work read any other way,
Some
of the cheap books clearly aren’t very good; some are pretty average; some are
okay; some are every bit as good as a book you would pay more for if it was
published by a traditional publishing house, and some are pure Indie gold--ie something new and exciting that is well written.
So how
do you find books you can guarantee are worth spending your time reading? Apart
from the blurb and the cover, you can sample a book (though you can’t do that
with the free ones on Amazon), you can read the reviews or you can buy only
those in the top 100. But it doesn’t take you long to discover that
·
you
can’t tell a book by its cover or its blurb
·
a
book can start out with promise and plummet to miserable depths very quickly
·
reader’s
reviews are unreliable. I have had several instances where I have bought books
that on Goodreads had an average of over 4 stars with about 20 reviews and
discovered that despite the fact that many readers loved the book enough to
give it 5 stars, it was poorly written. Readers know what they like, they
recognise a good story and great characters but they don’t necessarily
recognise when the story is poorly written. If you do, then you want a more
reliable method of recommendation.
·
Just
because a book sells well doesn’t mean that it is well written. It could be
selling well because it’s free.
So you
look for sites that might help you to negotiate the plethora of cheap ebooks
and you find
· sites
where authors pay to be featured. There is no quality control on these sites at
all. As a reader looking for quality, these are useless. All they are telling
you is which author has an advertising budget.
· sites
where authors don’t pay to be featured but there is still no quality basis for
the listing.
· sites
based on reader reviews. These are unreliable for the reason mentioned above.
The best option here is find a few review sites whose tastes mirror your own
and follow that person’s recommendations. The trouble is that many of them
either don’t review the cheap books or they rarely do, so you can be whetting
your appetite for books you can’t afford to buy, while waiting weeks or months
to hear of a good one that you can buy.
What
you need is a site where books are listed based on quality as decided by people
in the business of writing, people who presumably know their craft well enough
to be able to notice if the book is well written or not.
When I
was looking for such a site, there wasn’t one, but there is one now because I
set it up. It’s called The
Awesome Indies.
Because
all the books are independently published and therefore don’t have the
overheads of a big company, the author/publisher can afford to charge less for
their books than a traditional publishing house. Most of the books on the site
are less than $5, many are $2.99, single short stories are 99c and some are
free. Most of these books have occasional special promotions where they are free
or cheaper for a short period of time, but all of them are excellent quality,
so if you’re looking for quality cheap books then this really is the place.
What
do you think of the idea behind this site? Will it be useful for you?
Tahlia is an avid reader, an extremely
casual high school teacher and an occasional mask-maker. She has studied
philosophy & meditation for many years and likes to write inspiring &
empowering stories that question the nature of reality, mind and perception. After
scripting and performing in Visual Theatre shows for 20 years, she is now a
bone-fide expatriate of the performing arts. She lives in an Australian
rainforest, is married with a teenage daughter and loves cats, but she doesn’t
have one because they eat native birds.
http://tahlianewland.com
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