the metric for judging bad writing (on purely a technical level, not in reference to bigotry) in something that's indie published or published for free is very, very different to how it will be judged when it's traditionally published for profit.
Especially if it's a lot of profit for the very blatantly low amount of effort going into the objectively bad writing.
A lot of E M Fauld's short stories in Under The Moon really don't have endings, and some of them barely have a plot.
But this was indie published, and is now out of print, and there wasn't a professional editor involved whose whole entire job is editing.
So I judge these much less harshly than I do things by, as we all know, Martha Wells, who is a "professional" author who is getting paid by a traditional publisher, with multiple "professiona" paid editors. All of these things are *meant* to be guarenteeing some sort of bare minimum quality control, and they're not.
You absolutely can and should criticize writing even when it's shared for free. No one can ever improve their art if they never know what they're doing wrong.
But like, it's always going to be worse when the same level (or worse!!!) of technically bad writing is somehow skating past all the barriers to entry that are supposed to be there to assure basic quality in traditionally published books.
E M Faulds self publishes a collection of short stories in her own time with her own money?
Very different from Martha Wells, career author her entire adult life, making these exact same mistakes and more despite being a so-called "professional" at this, whose entire job is this, and has been since she graduated college, and who has multiple so-called "professional" editors whose whole entire job is editing books that are supposed to be passing these things through quality control.
Then we get things like Rapport. Which has no actual plot. And still has all the typoes left in it almost an entire year later. It was published online on July 10th 2026.
And despite blatantly being unedited, it is being sold in the kindle store for the same price as the very first book in the series was originally being sold — making a lot of people buy it thinking it was the next book in the series, and thinking their kindles were crashing because it literally doesn't have a plot, and just *stops* out of nowhere.
