Rise of the Indian writers and what it shows

The first thing I want to say is that I have found a shady line separating "indie" from the rest of the world; while I am indie, 100% indie, because I pay for absolutely nothing, very few writers are as absolutist as I am, especially when it comes to cover art, proofreading, and marketing. When I find a number of writers out there peddling their books on the read-marketing sites, I tend to think of them as indie, but in many cases they are not completely indie, and in fact even people who get publishing houses to peddle their books still have to go out and peddle their own quite a bit.

On the sites I inhabit there is a recent flood of very good Indian writers. Their books are well edited and interesting and among the best I have read, and as a result I tend to choose them often. They are choosing me, as it turns out, for entirely different reasons probably, but I'm proud to say my books are being read over there on amazon.co.in, and hopefully they are enjoying them.

The first thing it shows is that AI or Google Translate or whatever you call it, or whatever they use, is quite good going from Hindi to English, although I'm sure also that many Indian writers are simply fluent in English right off the bat due to their education or training or whatever. In other words, I'm not totally clear on whether they are relatively fluent in American/universl English or whether they have had some help from a machine, but in any case these are pretty good novels with no typos and not even Britishisms or Indianisms that would be unrecognizable to us Americans. I am interested in going the other way - making my American work available in Hindi - but I would have no way of assuring myself that the translated version was good, without friends picking through it and reminding me. Perhaps these writers have those friends. Perhaps even they are paying someone - it's not unheard of.

In this country paying someone to go over it with a fine tooth comb is quite expensive and it is simply unavailable to a wide swath of indie writers just because of price alone. And so, we have this problem where "indie" to some people means rough, not-proofread, full of errors, etc. and lots of times it is. There are still, by the way, some fantastic books that are full of errors so I want to point out that reading a lot of indie (as I do) means you never quite know what to expect and also that there is a wide variety and definitely plenty of diamonds in the rough so to speak.

The main thing it shows me is that writers and readers will quickly become more worldly. It is definitely in my best interest to get AI to help me translate all my books into as many languages as possible, and simply figure out the method to assure myself that they will be of the quality I want, even in the language they've been translated into. As a 30-year ESL/EFL professional I can't bear the thought of my books being sloppy in that regard even though I know that in lots of places there's quite a wide tolerance for a few errors and everyone knows enough English to know where a lot of those errors come from. So I could conceivably put my books into these languages and just wing it, or find out what the things are that AI has trouble with, and this would be quite interesting, but soon enough even this won't be necessary. AI will just get it right the first time, every time.

And that might make the literary world a mite more boring.