Honestly, the amount of exploitation in the industry is staggering. There are so many bad actors ready to take advantage of new authors. And this doesn't just apply to indie/self-publishing authors.
Traditional publishers leave most book marketing to authors unless you're already well-established and recognized. They have no real incentive to put more effort in until you start to get traction.
And the moment you put yourself out there, the amount of spam that comes crashing in from individual promoters (many of whom inflate their follower counts with bought followers) is mind-boggling.
Then there are vanity presses, offering paid services to bypass the usual query --> agent --> publisher process. But those presses have even less incentive to give high-quality service because you pay upfront (and again, they'll only offer to help with marketing if you actually start to do well).
The real issue, and the worst exploitation I see, is that all publishers have been pretending for years that printing costs and distribution are higher and more time-consuming than they really are. Services like Amazon KDP have completely blown the lid on this scam. A new author can upload their files and within 24 hours have a high-quality proof copy arrive on their doormat. So making new authors wait months (sometimes years) to hear from an agent, then months (usually 1-2 years) to have their book developed and published, and then giving them pennies in royalties per book sold, is absolutely ludicrous. It's more convenient for the agents and publishers dealing with vast volumes of submissions and trying to time publishing to suit their own checkbooks and priorities, but for authors that delay is an enormous barrier. It prevents new and unique voices from entering the industry without large reserves of cash or relegating their writing efforts to small windows of free time between other work.
A lot. I spent years in academia and developed very flowery, jumbled writing. Like most academics. My writing sounded smart and looked intelligent and well-researched on the surface, while being completely devoid of substance. Again, like most academics.
But around the time I had my first editor-in-chief role for a student journal, I took some editing courses online (mostly designed for journalists and business writers). Those courses transformed my writing overnight.
I happened to be reading lots of thrillers and horror novels at the time and noticed patterns in the ones I enjoyed. I like a book that sucks me in so I can't help but finish it as soon as possible. And the books that were doing this best for me were using the same writing styles I had just learned from those editing courses. I've spent the last few years trying to develop my own writing voice based on those lessons.
One of my favorite things about self-publishing is getting total control over the final book, including the copyright page. That's where you can find my answer (tongue-in-cheek) to this question (copied here for your convenience!):
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission from the author.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons is entirely coincidental.
If you believe you see yourself reflected in the pages that follow, try to remember: there’s no way the author likes you enough to incorporate you into his work.
^^^ I've gotten some hilarious reviews and good laughs from that last line. But the truth is a little more nuanced. It's impossible for the pivotal events of our lives to have no impact on our writing. And I believe the best fiction still tells us something true about the real world. So maybe it's better for me to answer like this: I never depict individuals or incidents, though traits and meaningful impressions definitely slip into my characters and storytelling.
