You have to at least admire the sheer hubris of an author who simultaneously spends $500 on a Kirkus review and then claims that they asked Kirkus not to publish it for “Branding Reasons.”

People won’t judge us simply because “one of our own” did something unethical. I believe people are smarter than that. But they will judge us if we continue to defend their bad actions and seek to deflect responsibility for those bad actions onto the consumer.

Claiming honesty and BEING honest are two different things. This is a point often missed by politicians, and equally overlooked in the indie community at times. Take the case of Bookplex as an example. Bookplex is another one of those places that sells reviews, promising that you will get five “honest and unbiased” reviews of your work for $45

Further evidence that, if I was unscrupulous, I would be rich and/or in control of the world. You should all thank my parents for raising me with morals.

But is that resentment truly an issue, or just a small, vocal minority of customers? We went to the Amazon.com customer forum to find out. Amazon.com has become, in many ways, the primary battleground for this discussion. With both its Createspace POD service and the Kindle self-publishing service, Amazon has made it easier than ever for authors to self-publish and promote their own books.

In Part Three of the series, we examine how readers view indie books and what they really care about.

In this article, we look at the actual results from the first of our informal surveys and identify important ethical considerations for authors.

Even if you have maintained a healthy level of confidence without creeping into an unhealthy sense of entitlement, it is easy to get caught up in the “us versus them” mentality that permeates through many independent publishing communities. It is a mentality fed by almost every single subsidy press and POD service, because it specifically discourages authors from following the traditional publishing route for all of the wrong reasons.

No single project on ethics will sway the mind of someone determined to screw over others for personal gain. Thankfully, most people want to do the right thing and want to behave in an ethical manner. But the road is not always clear, and it is easily clouded by unrealistic expectations, a sense of entitlement, and misplaced fears.

Part One concludes with a bried discussion of how to develop a strong ethical policy as an author.