Cleanup
I am doing cleanup work for a client. I see too many of these tragedies. I’m re-publishing a book my client published previously. They published a book, the book won’t sell, and the feedback from people they trust has not been positive.
My professional assessment did not help my client’s self esteem.
The book bears all the hallmarks of failure.
The cover is poor. Objectively sub-standard. To make matters worse, the publisher they paid to package the book and get it sold on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and in Walmart apparently doesn’t know that the text on the rear cover needs to be both justified and hyphenated. A glaring error that causes the book my client worked their entire professional life on to look like a friend’s teenager did the design on an “I’m helping you out and you’re paying me with exposure” basis.
I visit the publisher’s website. I want to know what every side of this sad, regrettable, situation looks like. I am engaged immediately by the publisher’s sales team. They have one of those chatbots you can pay $9.99 a month to have hosted on your website, so when a visitor navigates to the site someone on staff can pretend to be helpful. The digital equivalent of “Can I help you with anything?” when you’ve been browsing in a boutique in real life.
The sales exchange causes me to re-evaluate my perspectives, but then it turns darker and changes how I view my client. The sales team is voluntarily sending me spreads and samples of work they’ve done and every single book has the same issues. Page numbers are missing. Dialogue is not contained inside quotation marks. The paragraph spacing is terrible, and the headings... The headings are what really give it away.
The headings were clearly done using WordArt.
All these books were done in Microsoft Word. No wonder they look amateur. No wonder they don’t sell. No book in this company’s portfolio has received more than three hundred reviews on Amazon; most have less than ten. Nobody is buying these.
But that’s not the thing that changes how I feel about my client.
It’s the PDF I’ve attached below that did it.
From American Publisher’s perspective, when the sassy salesperson engaged with me, I was a prospective client. They told me how much they expected me to pay, right after they sent me this blurry, unprofessional PDF.
Now I get it...
You want to be a published author. You don’t have the time to learn how to distinguish professional-grade books from poorly produced ones but how did you see this blurry, grainy, low-resolution PDF and think to yourself:
“These are the people who will handle my life’s work with care.”
?!
And then I look at all the cheerful reviews clients have left on their website. I look at all the smiles and correlate them to the poorly produced books, still available— still not selling—on Amazon.
I look at that and I think, “People really seem to enjoy volunteering to be exploited. What a fantastic metaphor for our modern economy.”
In the end, there is still good news to be had. Good news for authors. Good news for capitalism, even. You made it here, didn't you?
The good news is there are many fantastic writers at Writing Nights. Writers like you. We know how to turn these stories around. We author so many happy endings.
Bestseller, after bestseller, after bestseller.
Here is another true story:
https://www.writingnights.org/2025/03/paid-too-much-to-pretend.html
