I recently read a couple of posts on Chuck Wendig’s blog over at TerribleMinds regarding a self-published author’s responsibility for the quality of the work they publish. For your reading pleasure, the whole discussion started with this post on John Scalzi’s blog HERE, where he drew an analogy between the writerly life to that of a baseball player. Wendig furthered the discussion HERE and HERE.
The gist of Wendig’s point is that, while self-publishing is easy and has destroyed the barrier to entry in the publishing industry, each author who self-publishes now holds the responsibility to do right by their readers. He posits that authors should act as their own gatekeepers, and that the moment an author asks someone to pay for something they’ve written they have a responsibility to the reader – their customers – to present a professional and complete product.
I won’t further that particular discussion except to say that I couldn’t agree with him more. While I was reading through these threads another dynamic was brought into sharp focus: readers’ tendencies with regards to association of quality. Here’s what I mean:
For a moment, let’s take self-publishing out of the picture and rewind to the days where traditional publishing was just called “publishing”. If a reader suffered through a bad book – be it poorly written or unprofessionally executed – that reader associated the lack of quality with the author. Rarely (and this is demonstrated in some of the responses to Wendig’s posts, and echoed all over the internet) did a reader associate poor quality with a particular publisher or the industry as a whole. The inverse was also true: read a good book, follow the author. I can’t remember a time that I’ve ever read a fantastic novel and thought to myself “Man, that publisher really knows what they’re doing.”
Fast forward to the modern era. That dynamic I mentioned still exists with traditional publishers. While the idea of self-publishing has brought publishers in general more into the limelight, readers still don’t tend to associate good or bad quality of traditional books with the publisher or the publishing industry – the quality association still falls squarely on the author. The same cannot be said of self-published work.
When a reader buys a self-published novel and it turns out to be fantastic, that author now has a new fan. The reader associates the quality of the novel directly with the author and that association is more pertinent without a publishing house acting as middle-man. But when a reader gets ahold of a bad self-published book – again, be it poorly written, edited, and/or produced – the mentality no longer defaults to “I’m not going to buy any more of that author’s work.”, it tends to be “Fuck this self-published crap.” The onus of quality now rests on an entire segment of the industry, full of individuals who have nothing to do with one another, the best of which now get dragged down by players whose attitude is simply to dump a block of text onto Amazon without a thought to its quality.
I think that mentality originates from the idea that the traditional publishing industry, with its gatekeepers in place, has developed a reputation for at least upholding a minimum standard of quality. Readers intuitively know that – for the most part – when they pick up a book at Barnes & Noble they can expect it to have run through several editorial passes and have been proofread a few times. Please note that by “quality” I am simply referring to editorial professionalism, not the quality of the actual stories being told.
Of course, the same cannot be said of self-published work. While the barrier to entry has been razed to the ground, so has the expectation of professionalism. Without “gatekeepers” in place, no one is held to any kind of standard at all, which allows any overzealous author to take advantage of the system – of readers – to collect money for sub-par work rather than hone their craft prior to charging for it. Which is exactly Wendig’s point: Without that ingrained expectation of quality that the industry took decades to build in the minds of readers, the responsibility now rests solely on self-published authors’ shoulders to not foist snake-oil onto their customers.
I am never going to be the person to say that a writer shouldn’t be allowed to self-publish (and neither is Wendig, so please don’t assume that as my point). In fact, the ease of self-publishing is likely going to be the reason my book sees the light of day. While I don’t necessarily think that “gatekeepers” – the traditionally difficult standards of entry set by agents, acquisitions editors, and publishers – are healthy in an environment that is beginning to value creator’s rights more than it ever has, I think that publishers will morph their role into that of curators of content rather than locking all the doors and holding all the keys, and in a scenario where self-publishing digitally becomes simple and ubiquitous, it might be time for service providers and device manufacturers to take an active role in building up the quality of self-published work.
In the late ‘70’s and early ‘80’s, the emergence of the home video game console experienced a similar issue. Atari created a console that was (comparatively) easy to program for and had almost no barriers to making games for it. Everyone from the big guys like Namco and Activision, down to programming teams of 2 guys in a basement, started making games. The result was an explosion of garbage – sometimes in the form of games that literally did not function. All of a sudden, there was a huge glut of expensive, quasi-functional trash, and no legitimate way to tell the good from the bad. Consumer confidence tanked, Atari went bankrupt, and the video game industry as a whole crashed – hard – and almost didn’t recover until a little Japanese company called Nintendo joined the fray in 1985.
Nintendo set a new standard for video game console manufacturers by providing a system that was easy to use and affordable for consumers, but simultaneously holding their publishers to a standard of quality by running every game through a battery of tests before it could be manufactured for Nintendo’s console. That system is still in place today at all the major console manufacturers, where all of them have a certification department that runs a series of tests on every single game to make sure that it adheres to a set of guidelines for usability and functionality.
These certification departments don’t judge the subjective quality of a game (if they did, we’d be blessed to never see another Petz or Babiez game again) instead simply making sure that a game functions properly, uses the correct terminology, and won’t break the console or hamper the user experience. And, in the face of a huge self-publishing boom in the video game industry, these certification departments aren’t going away – they’re adapting to the boom and working to help small video game developers publish games that never before would’ve seen the light of day.
The same model could be applied to self-published books. A company like Amazon could have a certification department full of proofreaders and copy editors whose jobs were nothing more than to comb over manuscripts and hold them to a certain level of production quality. Like the cert departments at Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo, they would not comment on the quality of the stories, and they certainly wouldn’t act in a true editorial capacity (just like the cert departments don’t act as bug-testing facilities), but they would be able to identify the mechanical problems with a manuscript and have the power to reject one until it passes muster.
Granted, this would require an investment of people and funds from companies like B&N and Amazon who – at the moment – have exactly zero motivation to do so. Quality isn’t their concern, and they make their 30-70% off of every book sold whether it’s crap or not, so it behooves them to promote high quantity with a low barrier to entry.
Atari once thought the same thing.
We may never see something like that come to pass unless Amazon gets a rude awakening like Atari did, which is unlikely to happen in the modern publishing climate (at least not anytime soon). This, I think, is why publishers as curators will become the next wave of business in the publishing industry. The model that immediately jumps to mind is Image Comics.
Creator-owned comics were mostly unheard-of up until the early ‘90’s. Comic book creators, fed up with the Big 2 paying them a pittance for their work and taking their creations away from them, were looking for a new way to do business. Image Comics was formed with what was, at the time, a revolutionary idea: Let the creators keep the rights to their work. Image acts in a publishing capacity insomuch as they provide editorial support, access to printing and distribution, and a unified logo under which readers can assume a certain level of quality.
Image does, to some degree, act as gatekeepers just like Marvel and DC do, but the trade-off for creators is that they retain the rights to their creations. One of the primary drives, for authors, behind the self-publishing movement is creative control and the preservation of their rights. Image has been successful in this practice, which has been followed by other companies like Boom! Studios and MonkeyBrain, and the model seems ripe for introduction into the publishing industry.
It’s unlikely that any of the major publishers like Tor or Random Penguin would ever concede rights to new properties to their authors. The industry seems ready, however, for publishers to act less like gatekeepers and more, as I said earlier, like curators of content, sifting through the morass of self-published books to offer a middle-ground solution for authors who want to couple the benefits of unified brand clout with the flexibility of creator-ownership.
The publisher can develop a brand identity unheard of in traditional publishing, where mainstream readers can go to find works they like based not solely on the author’s brand, but also the publisher. The author retains the rights to his or her work, and can build a brand of their own with the support of a larger entity. Readers would have a way to parse creator-owned work more than just by author, finding a stable or series of stables of curated content that fits their reading tastes. It seems like a win-win-win proposal, but I’m also not a business major.
I don’t think traditional publishing is going away. Nor do I think that self-publishing is steering the industry toward some inevitable implosion. I do, however, think that new business models will emerge that incorporate the best of both worlds, and maybe with a little bit of quality control on the service-providers’ ends, we could see a more balanced renaissance in the publishing industry that serves the business, the creators, and the consumers alike.
For now, though, all a fledgling author like me can do is ride out the storm, and try desperately not to suck.
