Spoken Like Somebody Who's Never Read Slush

Windows is pleading to be allowed to install updates, so I'm going through closing browser tabs that I opened foolishly thinking I might write about them. In that list is yet another blog post on how electronic books will kill traditional publishing. This one is fundamentally an economic argument, claiming that it will soon be more profitable for authors to self-publish on the Kindle than to go through a traditional publisher. I'm a little dubious about this, but it's at least an attempt at a quantitative foundation, rather than the usual boundless techno-optimism.

The first comment to the post has the essential rejoinder to this, which is that publishing is not just about making physical books, but also about selecting and improving books through the editing process. What elevates this to post-worthy is the author's response to this, which is generally pretty reasonable, but does include this:

I remain skeptical that the role of the publisher as a gatekeeper is essential. Personally, I've never looked at who the publisher is; I make my decisions purely by Amazon reviews and word-of-mouth.

This kind of misses the point. The claim isn't that there's a big difference in quality between books published by Simon and Schuster vs. books published by Penguin or Bantam or the imprint of your choice. The claim is that there's a big difference between books published by any established traditional publisher, and the millions of books that they choose not to publish. Saying "I go by Amazon reviews and word-of-mouth" is not an answer to this claim, because the books being reviewed at Amazon and discussed on blogs have already passed the publication test. Somebody has deemed them worthy of publication, so the gatekeeping function has already been performed.

While there is publisher-to-publisher variation-- in SF, for example, I'm significantly more likely to try a new author published by Tor than one published by Baen-- it's tiny compared to the variation between the stuff that gets published, and the vast mountains of crap that doesn't make it into print in the first place. If you haven't read slush-- the unpublished, unsolicited manuscripts that publishers get by the thousands-- it's hard to appreciate just how essential the gatekeeping function is.

The best example I've heard of this for the fiction side of things was that if you want to appreciate what editors and publishers do, you should go to fanfiction.net and pick ten works completely at random and read them, or as much of them as you can stand. Then do that every day for a month.

I'm not sure what the non-fiction equivalent of that is, though there ought to be one. "Choose ten blogspot blogs at random and read them" probably comes close. Suggestions are welcome in the comments.

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Commercial publishers and editors are also cooperative gatekeepers in copyright enforcement since they have real incentives to ensure what they publish is not violating any one else's copyright. Self publishing doesn't have that kind of peer policing and that could lead to authors having to spend more time protecting their work than creating new.

Oh, the stuff on fanfaction.net falls somewhere in the middle of slush quality. It is nowhere near the worst. I've read slush, lots and lots of it. In all of the thousands of manuscripts I saw, only a handful where anywhere near publishable quality.

But it is also true that a sizable chunk of what is published, especially in genre fiction, is technically not much better than average slush; there is not a clear division quality-wise.

And it is also true that occasionally commercial publishers miss something actually good, and/or of money-making value. The system is far from perfect. But on the whole, under the system as it is now, you're not missing a whole lot: most of what is worth publishing is getting published somehow, and a whole lot that is not worth publishing is also getting out anyway.

There are some small publishers (and remember, there are many--thousands of them) who are putting out good product that just can't make money in traditional distribution that might actually benefit from ebook distribution. On the nonfiction side, some of those publishers are just very special-interest oriented, and distribution is less of an issue, though physical production costs may be a huge issue.

The basic problem is that every year, an enormous number of new books get published, and only a very tiny percentage of that will get wide-scale attention. And no change in the technology or cost-structure of publishing is going to change that basic fact.

Just a little off-topic, but doesn't your browser remember which tabs you had open if you shut it down? You should be able to simply kill it, then it'll ask if you want to restore the tabs the next time you start it.

On topic: the selection function of editing is pretty essential. But you can make the argument that word-of-mouth and reviews do have much the same function. It's like instead of having one editor reading 200 pieces of junk every month with five or ten making the cut, you have a few hundred people each trying to read something and posting their opinions about it.

Objections to this view:

"Some great works are going to go unread and missed by everybody"

Yes. Just as it does today. You already have the occasional tale of a runaway bestseller rejected by a dozen editors out of hand before somebody took a real look at it.

"A lot of junk is going to get high marks, because the author is popular or people's tastes are weird"

Again, yes, and again, it already happens. Nobody who's perused the shelves of a large sci-fi bookstore has any doubt that a fair amount of unreadable pulp is being published despite the best efforts of editors.

Do I think word of mouth or reader reviews can be fully as good as professional editors? No, probably not. But it doesn't have to be. It only needs to be good enough to weed out most junk and give you a decent chance of getting something readable. And I do think it's good enough for that.

Every once in a while I click the "Next Blog" button on BlogSpot for about fifty blogs. I do this--oh, maybe once every six months or so? Anyway, the majority are garbage.

I'm an unpaid moderator over at http://www.physforum.com/ and the people who think they know biology, physics, math and/or logic never seem to get that contributions to human knowledge must be communicable, useful, reliable and verifiable.

I'm not sure what the non-fiction equivalent of that is, though there ought to be one. "Choose ten blogspot blogs at random and read them" probably comes close. Suggestions are welcome in the comments.

I think that this argument is self-defeating because we clearly don't just read blogposts at random. Even although there is no publisher, we still have good methods of selecting interesting blogs to read. For example, if one of the people who I follow on twitter mentions a post, I am likely to read it and maybe subscribe to the blog if I find it interesting. Also, I can look at blogrolls and "top blogs" lists like the one you advertised yesterday to find new blogs to read. I simply don't have to wade through a pile of "slush blogs" in order to find something decent. People have already done a lot of that for me and it is much more targeted to my interests than simply noting whether something is published or not. Why can't the same mechanisms work for book-length writing?

Having said that, I think there is still a strong argument that publishers do provide a valuable service in editing books, i.e. a well-edited book is a much better read than the author's original draft. If we could combine the editing role of publishers with a self-publishing system on the internet then I think we could have a pretty decent system.

Matt, how are those blogs discovered in the first place?

My usual experience is that the writer pimps the links in various places where it might get picked up. Someone follows it, spends maybe a minute (if that) scanning to see if it's worth reading.

That is harder to do with a novel, or even a short story.

Worse, if you are trying to sell those (e)books it would be more like getting linked to an Amazon page with a blurb, few pages of the story and maybe some reader reviews. Only not the blurbs, because that requires some networking that usually publishers deal with. And there wouldn't be many reviews because publishers usually deal with that side as well.

Crowdsourced quality control works when what you are controlling the quality of is 1) free, 2) quickly/easily assessed and 3) has a high signal/noise ratio. Music recommendations almost work this way for unsigned bands. Mostly you can afford to ignore them, but if you get a recommendation you can assess it in seconds, usually for free. That isn't usually true for books.

By Paul Schofield (not verified) on 28 Nov 2009 #permalink

Self-publishing's weakest link IMO is its lack of a gatekeeping function, which traditional publishing has with the editing process. I suspect this is a hole that will be eventually plugged, perhaps by more respected bloggers who review books (like the now-defunct PODdy Mouth blog).

I *do* look at publishers to avoid SP/POD specifically although I've been caught a few times with publisher names I didn't recognize. I can say that of the three or four self-pubbed efforts I've read so far, they hardly represent the very worst the slush pile has to offer. The writing was actually quite good; there were, however, storyline issues that needed to be resolved. Three of them had the classic "sagging in the middle" problem; the fourth one had an anticlimactic/fuzzy ending but was otherwise, IMO, quite good.

While New York circles the wagons at the moment and hands out book contracts to popular blogs and writers who then re-write classic works and throw in paranormal elements like zombies and sea monsters, it's hard to take traditional publishing very seriously right now either. I sure as hell don't need a gatekeeper to tell me these "real" books are an utter waste of my time, and probably less interesting than the self-pubbed efforts I've read so far.