By Peter Stuart
Smith (AKA Max Adams, James Barrington, James Becker, Tom Kasey, Thomas Payne
and Jack Steel)
There’s one aspect of the electronic publishing revolution
which is now becoming clear and which is also beginning to cause concern among
people who actually care about the English language.
Because quite literally anybody can now publish
virtually anything as an ebook, without the benefit of any form of writing
ability and ignoring even the most rudimentary attempt at editing, there are
hundreds, perhaps thousands, of ebooks out there which are borderline
illiterate and in some cases completely illiterate, full of grammatical errors,
spelling mistakes and faulty punctuation. The corollary to this is that there
are very clearly also tens or hundreds of thousands of readers who either don’t
know what’s wrong with what they’re reading, or simply don’t care. Presumably,
as long as the story romps along in a reasonably satisfactory fashion, the fact
that the author can’t spell and has no idea what to do with an apostrophe or
what a gerund is, simply doesn’t bother them.
The
author of the novel Beautiful Disaster, Jamie MacGuire, for example, has
been criticised for poor usage and command of English, but that hasn’t stopped
the book getting into the top 40 on the Amazon bestseller list. And the same
criticisms and have been applied to Tracey Garvis Graves, the author of On
the Island, but the novel has sold over 360,000 copies in ebook format, and
she’s recently signed a contract for a reported seven figures with a Penguin
imprint, yet another example of a self-published book being purchased by a
mainstream publishing house. Which presumably means that at least the printed
version of the book will be literate.
Some
people are deliberately taking advantage of the freedom offered by the Kindle
to make a kind of obscure joke, perhaps the best recent example of this being The
Diamond Club by Patricia Harkins-Bradley. The author doesn’t exist, being a
creation of ‘Not Safe For Work’ comedy website presenters Brian Brushwood and
Justin Young.
And
the book itself isn’t really a book, either, in that it doesn’t tell any kind
of a coherent, logical or even vaguely sensible story. It was basically spawned
by the success of the Fifty Shades of Grey series, and the authors – if that’s
the right term – simply created an attractive cover and a blurb which promised
far more than the book could possibly deliver, and stuffed the inside with pretty
much anything they could find.
Their
masterstroke was to acknowledge the joke, putting the book on the iTunes store for
only 99 cents and encouraging people who bought it to post a hilarious
five-star review. And it worked.
The book
was published on 29 July 2012 and by 15 August it was at number four in the
iTunes’s bestseller list with over 2260 reader ratings averaging at 4.5 stars.
On Amazon.com on 23 January 2013, and priced at $1.59, it stood at number
28,225 with 95 reviews averaging 4.1 stars, while on the same day on Amazon UK
it was at number 133,131 with only seven reviews averaging 3 stars. So maybe
British readers are less able to see the joke, or want far more for their 99
pence than this offering. By any standards, the book is awful, with no
discernible plot, just a series of largely unconnected sex scenes and simply
terrible writing. But that, of course, was precisely the point of the exercise,
to write a best-seller that was completely unpublishable by any sensible
standard.
And on this subject, I do
have a suggestion that might help readers decide what ebooks to buy. At the
moment, the only way a reader can decide whether a particular ebook is likely
to be worth reading is to look at the name of the publisher and glance at the
reviews. If it’s a commercial publishing house, that should mean that the book
will be grammatically accurate, and if it’s got good reviews then the story
might be entertaining as well.
Perhaps a system could be
initiated whereby for a small fee a self-published book could be submitted to
an independent assessor who would analyse – not the story – but the way the
story has been written, the way the language has been used. Any book which is
deemed to be literate could then be awarded a kind of seal of approval, a stamp
of quality, something like the old kitemark we used to have in Britain.
It wouldn’t
be much, but it might be one small step towards stemming the tide of electronic
illiteracy that is now threatening to engulf us all.
You can contact me at:
Twitter:
@pss_author
Facebook:
Peter Stuart Smith
Blogs: The
Curzon Group
Website link: Brit
Writers
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