She may have designed her own cover too...

This may be a bit controversial, but something that really annoys me is the misuse of the term “indie” when it comes to publishing. Indie to me (and the publishing company I work for) denotes an independent publisher. Self publishing is still known as the vanity press. Sorry.

Of course, lots of writers don’t want to say that they self publish, because, let’s face it, most people are of the opinion that if you didn’t get a contract with a publisher (indie included here) your book isn’t going to be that good. I know that there are numerous examples of people who have self published and gone on to have great success, and many will cite a variety of reasons (other than flat-out rejection by publishers) for deciding to self publish. Fair enough.

Wherever you stand on the issue of self publishing, you can’t help but notice that there has been a widespread attempt to rebrand self publishers recently. Because of course there will be some genuinely talented writers who aren’t what publishers are looking for, and why not challenge the stigma? Good for them.

Not everyone is making such an effort to cooperate with the rebranding of the vanity press though. You’ll have been hard pressed to miss the recent case of semi literate self publisher Jacqueline Howett who, when faced with a negative review, had an almighty meltdown on BigAl’s Books and Pals, a review website devoted to reviewing books from the indie press. Reading Jacqueline Howett’s comments on Big Al’s blog, I highly doubt her claims that she is from England, or any other English-speaking country. I don’t know how else to explain the misuse of the English language.

I won’t be reading any of her books, not matter how great she claims they are. The only way to have made these comments any funnier for me would have been for her to extend her poor spelling to the book’s title The Greek Seaman.

Thank you Jacqueline, thank you for your crazy comments which went viral around my office and brightened up an otherwise boring day.