My first indie reads were books by a friend of mine several years ago. I have a Master’s in Lit and taught English Comp and Lit classes for me than 10 years and he asked me if I would be interested in editing them. I did and I was very impressed by his books. At the time I had begun writing my first novel but didn’t get around to finishing it until recently. Since that time I’ve found myself in some indie author communities on social media. I decided to start reading their books. My usual go to authors haven’t been keeping up with my reading demands and I haven’t had any luck finding additional traditionally published authors to read. It’s all the same. Same story, different characters, different settings. Very predictable endings. I’ve found a refreshing group of new stories among the indies. They aren’t bound to the limits set by publishing houses. They don’t have to write about the same acceptable plot with the same acceptable outcome. I’ve read some people comment that the quality isn’t there in self published books. I haven’t seen that. Sure there are the occasional typo and missed error. I’ve found similar in traditionally published books as well. I read a book by a NYT bestseller recently in which it appeared the editing stopped 50 pages from the end. There were so many typos and errors in those last 50 pages. I’ve only DNF’ed one indie book in the last several months and that was a quality issue. There were too many errors. If it was a paper from one of my students it would have gotten a D at best. I just couldn’t continue. But that was 1 book out of a couple dozen or so and I knew before I finished the 1st chapter. Anyway, have you read any indie books? If not, why not?

For anyone that’s interested, I have a page on my website dedicated to recommended reads. I have listed all of the indie books I’ve read and recommend there. I created the page with the intent of giving my potential readers insight into the books I read because they do influence my writing.