Admittedly, the vast majority of authors who have been going the self-publishing route write more for the non-fiction market with their how-to guides and supposedly informational literature, but that along with those authors who seek to dabble in the fictitious market has seen somewhat of a rapid rise in self-published writers and authors. As quickly as the emergent self-publishing craze has risen however, it has fallen with many readers realising just how “thin” the content they get via Amazon’s Kindle programme is and I mean that both figuratively and literally.

You have a lot of what are becoming the standard 5,000 word books with a nice enough cover (probably sourced from a $5 dollar graphic designer from Fiverr), however upon completing many of these books readers often find that it’s nothing but some information they could have Googled themselves.

You would think that this would be concerning for those of us authors who actually spend the requisite time researching the information we put together and interpret in a manner which makes it valuable as some literary work, but that’s not the case at all. You see if you take pride in the work you do and if you do it with the original purpose of seeking to provide value to the market, no amount of quickly-written 5,000 word books are going to spoil the party for us.

It takes a lot to produce the type of quality which the market will eventually gravitate back to, but for those of us with more genuine intentions in producing the content we publish this isn’t work at all. It’s quite a lot of fun, making for some eye-opening experiences in many cases, whether you’re outright providing advice or information your target audience can use practically or indeed if your literary works are aimed more at entertaining the target audience than anything else.

There’s one little secret which all budding authors can use and all authors seeking to stay relevant in fact, that being the fact that if you’re writing fiction, what that basically should mimic is reality and the other way around too.

The cliché “fact is stranger than fiction” rings true in the world of literature, so too the fact that readers want water-tight storylines when they’re reading fiction, even though they know it’s fiction.

The most renowned of writers will go to great lengths to make sure their storylines simply cannot have any holes picked in them, such as one fellow author I know (who is into writing fiction with a legal theme) who visited the offices of a Miami car accident attorney just so that he could see the legal process in action first-hand. This is where and how that inexplicable authenticity which separates average content from great content is generated and unfortunately for those overnight-success-seeking writers that’s the type of authenticity which cannot be faked.

So things are starting to normalise again and fortunately for the readers the fakers are weeding themselves out, leaving room for those of us for whom this writing thing is a labour of love.