In Michael Kozlowski’s post: We Live in a Literary World of Terrible Self-Published Authors he writes:
Many indie authors will read this article and think, this guy’s off-base, I am a great author! Charles Darwin begs to differ.He correctly summed up the current state of affairs in the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Indie authors are “unskilled individuals that suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than is accurate. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their ineptitude.”
I think most indie authors have an inflated sense of self-importance and suffer from the American Idol factor. You see it on TV all the time – deluded individuals who are utterly convinced the judges have failed to recognize their genius. “I’ll be back next year and they’ll be sorry then!” Yes, they will.
I can’t say I disagree with Kozlowski’s assessment. I had one of those awful books on Amazon, and wrote the post Things I Wish I Knew before Self-Publishing.
My reasons were multifaceted. Hey, I’m street smart (mostly), I went to college (kind of), I read a lot (true), I don’t need to spend my hard-earned cash on something my spouse deems a daydream and hasn’t even read (bitter much?) I write legal briefs all day long. I’m great at research. My mom said it was good!
Ah, no.
I had a real sit-down with myself over my ineptitude after the smackdown of a review that is one of the first things that comes up on Google Wheeler (other than that TV show Wheeler Dealers). I’m the exact opposite of genius. Why else would I have put crap out?
For Wheeler Book II, I’m not making that mistake again and will have the same editor I had for book one. But, after submitting real crap to so many literary agents, why bother querying again?
Will I jump the Amazon ship come September 30th when my 90 days is up? Where do you go?
It’s a nice daydream.
Wheeler 