Tell me there's not something fundamentally going on here

[B.R.Stateham]

 

Interesting article found in Publisher's Weekly about self-published/micro-niche publishing houses.  The number of books produced is staggering when compared to the publishing tracks of traditional houses. 

 

True, a vast number of the 'published' works might very well be laughable forgettables.  Yet I'm not happy of dumping micro-niche small publishers in with self-publishing.  There are a lot of micro-niche (read that as genre-specific) publishers who are putting out outstanding works professionally crafted.

 

As far as I am concerned this is another nail in the traditional publishing big corproate world.  That end of the spectrum will continue to decline if they make no effort to broaden their horizons.  This former will only increase.

 

http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/456396-Self_Published_Title...

[I. J. Parker]

Can't say I had the patience to listen to all that. Surely the man can get his Beta blockers even while on a trip. Beta blockers are not something you mess around with.

However, he's not altogether convincing about this PC bit, that supposes the advances in education have turned groups of people who weren't white and male and previously locked out into authors. In the first place, education has not advanced, and that accounts for a dramatic reduction in readers. So what you have is a lot of people who have the self-confidence (something that is strongly stressed in education these days) but not the background to write books, while at the same time fewer people buy these books. This may be particularly skewed between fiction and nonfiction. Nonfiction (how-to books etc) sell extremely well these days, while fiction is no longer needed, having been replaced by TV and film.

[Benjamin Sobieck]

eBook vendors seem to be taking the quantity over quality approach. Smashwords, which sells indie eBooks, has a goal of publishing 1 billion words by the end of the year. You can read about it here.

In it, he explicitly states he's not concerned with quality. "The readers will decide that." He just wants a huge volume of work to be available.

Sounds to me like little has changed. "Throw it all the wall and see what sticks" business plans have failed for decades. Readers may ultimately decide what's good, but they don't want to wade through crap. We need real gatekeepers.

[John McFetridge]

e-book "publishers" and gatekeepers are two different tings, though. Smashwords is more like Kinkos, where Soft Skull Press and a lot of other good publishers were born. It's the printing press and the delivery truck, it's not the publisher.

We still need some kind of weeding out process to find the kind of books we like out of the tens of thousands published every year but limiting the supply is over. And in a free market we shouldn't limit the supply.

Right now, if I had an urge to read a noir-ish novel set in the 1960's (but written recently), I would come here to Crimespace and a couple of other online communities and ask for recommendations before I'd go to a bookstore. If the recommended book looked good to me, I wouldn't care who published it. Places like this are becoming the new gatekeepers.

[B.R.Stateham]

John, good point about Crimespace becoming (yet sill a long ways to go) gatekeeper for the selective reader. Interesting idea.

[I. J. Parker]

Yes, indeed. I agree about the new gatekeepers. But who's going to tell the readers? Readers aren't plugged into these web sites in any great numbers. The best gatekeepers are reviewers, particularly the few who still have their articles in major papers, and those who also publish on top Internet news sites like THE DAILY BEAST.

[John McFetridge]

It's interesting you metion THE DAILY BEAST, because he mentioned it in his talk, too. He pointed out that they are now moving into publishing themselves and have started with e-books which may get a print run later if they're succesful.

They can do that with e-books because the capital required is so low. Sure, we still need some kind of weeding out process, but the criteria that old-style publishers used to decide what to publish have changed so much. Smaller presses can now make even more books available for readers to choose from. Yes, it's going to be messy for a while, but new kinds of gatekeepers will emerge.