Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

A lot of you are asking how this could happen. For instance: 1. What's that blonde sugarplum doing on the cover of Anne of Green Gables? 2. What was the publisher thinking? 3. Didn't the cover designer read the story? Answers: 1. The photo of the blonde girl in the plaid shirt is a piece of cheap stock photography. It wasn't created specifically for these books. The photographer who took it had no idea where it would wind up. All he did was consign it to a stock art service. Some time later, the person who put this edition together paid a small fee for the non-exclusive right to use the image. 2. The publisher was thinking "Hey, free money!" These novels are out of copyright. That means anyone can republish them. This particular omnibus edition was produced via CreateSpace, Amazon's mediocre print-on-demand operation, so the publisher didn't even have to put up much money. All it took was interior text, cover, a few pages of frontmatter, and a CreateSpace account. Amazon does the rest and gets paid for it. When I say "publisher," don't imagine professionals working in a New York office. This edition was slapped together by someone sitting at a computer somewhere, swapping and manipulating files without reading them. You can tell they don't know or care about books. They know zero about book design, and they leave blatant errors uncorrected -- just look at the centering on the title page. They don't give the publisher's name on the title or copyright page, but they do claim copyright on the edition, which is a piece of bleeping effrontery. The interior text has been stolen from some other publisher's edition, and has gotten seriously messed up in the process. Use "Look inside this book," go to page five, and check out the first three paragraphs. First sin: they've ignored the chapter breaks, and instead have run all the chapters together as a single text file. Second sin: they've turned the chapter titles into the first sentence of the opening paragraph of the chapter. Third sin: see the odd italicized text at the beginning of the third paragraph? It's the bit that says "The little birds sang as if it were ..... The one day of summer in all the year." That's not part of the paragraph. It's a quote from James Russell Lowell's "The Vision of Sir Launfal." You can see how it was supposed to be set up here: [...]. These guys don't care. So here's the entire process from start to finish: Set up an account at CreateSpace. Swipe some other publisher's text of the first three Anne of Green Gables titles. Pour the text into a book template. Type out some rudimentary frontmatter. Have your cover designer take a standard cover template, type in the author's name and the book titles, add a hastily chosen stock photo, and set a price of $13.49 a copy. Done! Start in on your next book. You and Amazon make money off every copy that sells. 3. Did the cover designer read the story? Not a bit of it. No one involved in producing this edition read any of the books. Odds are, the cover designer was working from a brief description that said these books are about a girl growing up in a rural setting. It may or may not have mentioned Canada. He or she picked out a stock photo of a cute girl leaning on a bale of hay, with out-of-focus farmland behind her. Good enough. 4. So here's the other question: does this kind of thing happen a lot? And shouldn't Amazon do something about it? Answer: yes, it happens all the time; and while you'd think Amazon would take action, you shouldn't hold your breath waiting for it to happen. Amazon exercises next to no oversight over the books it sells, including those published via CreateSpace. Authors have found competing editions of their recently-published books for sale that way. For a while, the guys who do shovelware editions were robo-harvesting randomly linked articles from Wikipedia, dumping the results into book templates, and packaging them as high-priced educational nonfiction. They had amazing numbers of titles offered for sale on Amazon. Few of them sold, but it didn't matter because the "publishers" had the whole thing automated and didn't pay for any of the components. Any copies that sold were pure profit. Amazon profits too. The losers in all cases are the book-buying readers. ===== [Note: I have never before asked anyone to vote up my reviews. That's the reader's call, not mine. But in this case, tagging my review as "useful" could save later readers a lot of WTFery when they see that cover. If you disagree, no problem.]