In my daily perusal of Facebook, I came across an author proudly announcing the debut of his just-published book. Intrigued, I went to the book’s buy page on Amazon and read its description. The well-written description intrigued me further—just the kind of story that I love—but the cover looked homemade, so I used the “read a sample” feature.

I’m glad I did.

I read the first three chapters, which sounds like a lot of content but isn’t. Each of those chapters is about a page and a half—short. Each of the first three chapters introduces one of the three protagonists.

Chapter 1 begins with a paragraph mostly consisting of expository description followed by a paragraph of backstory (e.g., information dump). In the third paragraph some mild action happens: the character makes a decision.

Chapters 2 and 3 are better: something happens. There’s less expository description. The reader gets a sense of each character’s personality.

Then there are the copy errors, from a failure to use subjunctive case to incorrect use of pronouns to punctuation errors. I saw no misspelled words or malapropisms or homonym errros, so I’ll give credit where credit’s due. The author used a basic spell checking program.

In addition to the lackluster beginning, the book’s non-standard page design leaves much to be desired. Deep first line indentation of paragraphs intrudes by drawing notice to the stylistic affectation. Extra line spacing between paragraphs hinders the eye’s progress from paragraph to paragraph.

The e-book is priced at $6.99. That’s not an outrageous price for e-books these days, but it’s obvious the author did not invest in the book’s quality. The author did not hire a professional editor, cover designer, book designer, or proofreader. (Or, if he did, the vendors he used were not competent.) Yet, the author expects readers to pay for a book that he himself did not invest in.

This may be a case of the author not knowing what he doesn’t know. Or it may be an issue of the author suffering from the misunderstanding that self-publishing means “do it all yourself.” Or it may be an issue of an author not having the resources to afford all those professional services to produce the book as quickly as he wanted to publish it.

Regardless, he did his book a disservice. The failure to invest in his book’s quality dooms to ignominy what could be an otherwise commercially successful contender.

Rather than embarrass him by exposing those flaws in a comment to his post, I sent him a message noting the issues with his book and advising him to hire an editor, book designer, and cover designer. I emphasized that I was not suggesting he hire me and gave him resources to find some professionals. I also offered to refer him to other professionals.

He probably won’t take it well, and that’s a shame because that could have been a terrific book as well as a great story.

I’m not judging this author. I’ve made those same mistakes; however, I like to think I’ve learned (and continue to learn) from those mistakes and the mistakes I still make. Instead, I hope to give what appears to be a talented storyteller some much-needed direction because I’d like to see him succeed.

You’ll find a lot of self-published authors complaining about gatekeepers who make publishing a rich man’s game. The problem isn’t that publishing is a rich man’s game; the problem is that publishing is a business. It has always been a business. Success in business requires financial investment in addition to skill, time, and effort. It’s not untrue to state that “spending” less in any of those requirements equates to greater spending in the others.

For traditional publishers, the expenses of publishing and marketing quality books necessitate calculated guesses as to what will turn a profit. They have employees’ salaries and benefits to pay on top of production expenses and royalties. Hybrid presses earn their money from the fees paid by authors and may be less choosy about what books they’ll publish. For self-published authors, books are often passion projects entered into with little expertise and less knowledge, but grandiose (and delusional) expectations of success.

Like I said: publishing is a business. To succeed, you have to treat it like a business.