Crash Course On How Bad Writers Get Published

So here I was, wondering how such truly bad 'authors' manage to get published, let alone listed on Amazon. Most of us think publishing a book means a publishing company was interested in the book, it went through editors, was polished up, had a cover designed and then was printed, marketed and sold, with the author being paid & subsequently gaining a royalty percentage from sales, yes?

Completely wrong. How much I have learned. This blog being about Rochelle Moore/Siohban Moore Whelan/et al, I will use her first c&p book from 2005, Karma, as the example.

Moore cobbled together a handful of quotes from religious and historical figures (use Amazon's Peek Inside feature), threw in some really bad poetry, and then paid Booksurge to publish her little tome. Judging from the cheapy cover, she went with the Express package for $99, got an ISBN, submitted her PDF file and - voila - her book was on Amazon.

It's a sad statement about modern progress, and I won't even touch the irony of the term 'desktop publishing.'

Who owns Booksurge? Amazon. But wait - there's moore. From the Amazon listing of Karma, the rather misleading product promo includes the following statement:

'As reviewed by Ellen Tanner Marsh – New York Times Best-Selling Author: Karma-It's a seeming simple concept that is either misunderstood or ignored entirely.'

Reviewed by a Times bestselling author; that must be good, you might think. Until you find out that Ellen Tanner Marsh has a 'working relationship' with BookSurge.com, and as a premium add-on service, BookSurge allows self-publishing authors to purchase a personally crafted review written by "New York Times bestselling author, Ellen Tanner Marsh."

An entire system aimed to mislead consumers & profit from every lousy wanna-be author.

The Great Question of 'how does such unedited/misspelled/grammatically-incorrect trash get published?' has been answered.

For more about the self-publishing world in detail, see this.