Worst. Blurbs. Ever.

[elf]

I love me some Smashwords. You know that, right? I'm strongly in favor of self-publishing, of non-DRM'd ebooks, of pricing flexibility, of wide distribution of artistic efforts in general. I'm not too fond of the Meatgrinder it uses to format the books--there's problems with any instruction manual that says "if you have X problem, you can probably fix it by doing Y, but if that doesn't work, scratch everything and start over and you should be okay." But I love the Smashwords business model, and its promotion of self-publication as a viable creative and business outlet.

But sometimes... I'm just baffled at how much LACK OF PROOFREADING goes into things. I'm not even talking about the books themselves. I have a rule: if the promo blurb makes me wince, or jars me with bad phrasing or lack of punctuation, I don't even consider getting the book, no matter how fascinating the plot sounds. If the author can't be bothered to get their basic ad copy coherent, I don't trust their editing skills either.

( Examples under the cut. You have been warned. )