On the one hand, self-publishing can be great, right? All of those roadblocks to getting your novel out there are removed and suddenly you have this book that you’ve worked so hard on and people are buying it and reading it. And I’m sure that can feel amazing. But something I’ve noticed over the years is that the market of self-published novels is overly saturated with poorly edited books.

It’s wild to me to think about what a team of professionals can do to a novel before it reaches the hands of the public.

And while, sure, it’s great for the doorway to becoming a published author to be somewhat more open than it used to be, but it does genuinely make me wonder how great this is sometimes. Some self-published works can be amazing, for example Erin Michelle Sky and Steven Brown’s The Wendy series. Others might have been amazing if they’d had a proper team provide feedback on the novel as a whole, I think specifically to a self-published work I read recently.

And then there’s trash like 50 Shades of Grey that never should have even gotten to a publisher in the first place, let alone past them.

I’m kind of spewing out thoughts here, but I just can’t help feeling really disappointed at the fact that some self-published books really just need those extra pushes to be fantastic, but they didn’t get them because of how difficult the publishing process is. And I know there’s a racial element to this, which breaks my heart.

I dunno. I guess it’s just that I’m so torn up about the fact that this book had so much potential that felt completely wasted in the end. And there are a lot of things playing into this fact. It’s a self-published work and the author is PoC. I’ll admit, I don’t know what roadblocks black authors face with traditional publishing but I do know that they exist and thus I find myself kind of infuriated because this book very much needed and could have gone so far with a team of professionals.

And for that, I find myself not the biggest fan of self-publishing. A lot of the work I come across feels unfinished and I don’t know how to reconcile with that.

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