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04/07/2011 • 5:42 AM

Self-publishers are judged unfairly

I’ve been thinking about what makes things go viral. As per my last post, put two babies together, let them babble, and you’ve got a ubiquitous video that’s hard to avoid. Cute animals go viral. When Sarah Palin said “squirmish” instead “skirmish” I thought that would go viral. It didn’t really, which is as telling a sign of her fifteen minutes being up as any deep analysis of her political future.

Then there was the author who lost her frigging mind.

If you somehow missed this story, here’s the ugly summary: She got a lukewarm review. The reviewer said the story was good but her self-published book was is dire need of a copy editor. The author unadvisedly went into the comments section of the book review blog and was anything but gracious. She blamed the book reviewer for downloading the wrong (substandard) copy. Then she railed some more. She was fighting uphill from the beginning, of course. You don’t pick a fight you can’t win in someone else’s house. Regular review readers rose to the reviewers defense. Things got even more heated when said author then resorted to profanity. The comments section blew up as people piled on. I am not piling on. Plenty has been said about this and frankly, there’s nothing more for me to say about that. In fact, too much was said about that.

What I do want to talk about is the comment, made several times, about self-publishers. The point was that this author exemplified the lack of professionalism that reinforced the posters’ opinion that they would never, ever read a self-published book.

Wow. How unfair.

Traditionally published authors have made this same mistake.

Not all self-published authors let manuscripts go to press unedited.

Not all self-published authors would act so unprofessionally as to react so negatively to a book reviewer.

Clearly, the poster talking about “all self-publishers” has a bias and found an anecdote that confirmed that bias.

The phenomenon is called confirmation bias.

It’s lazy thinking that leads to prejudice.

Prejudice ≠ a good thing.