Every­body Pub­lishes, You Stink­ing Gatekeeper

Most peo­ple employed pub­lish­ing books per­haps as soon as 10 years from now won’t be work­ing for pub­lish­ing companies.

Take that, you stink­ing gatekeeper.

Okay, the ‘tude I’m throw­ing around here is not Mike Shatzkin’s. That’s my “edi­to­r­ial embell­ish­ment.” Poor Mike asked for noth­ing so crude.

But I want to call atten­tion today to some­thing that seems to have wafted in on the ver­nal equinox, and may rep­re­sent one of those rare high-view moments in our grad­ual dis­cov­ery of what “dig­i­tal dis­rup­tion” ulti­mately means for publishing.

We spend so much time rip­ping the minu­tiae to confetti-sized bits that I find myself pretty grate­ful for the insti­tu­tional sweep Shatzkin can, at times, bring to the table.

 

Shatzkin’s essay Atom­iza­tion: pub­lish­ing as a func­tion rather than an indus­try is just such a keeper. While nobody can con­tribute more cross-shredded bits to the con­fetti cyclone than Shatzkin along the way, when he’s able to climb up a lamp­post and look down on the parade like this, his half-century of super-aware par­tic­i­pa­tion in the indus­try! the indus­try! allows him to see pat­terns in the ticker tape the rest of us might take for granted and miss.

With so many more books to choose from…than there ever were before, the func­tion of gate­keep­ers, which trade pub­lish­ers and book­sellers clearly and proudly were, becomes an anachronism. The big ques­tion — at least for me — is what is trade pub­lish­ing tran­si­tion­ing to? What does the trade pub­lish­ing world look like when it doesn’t pri­mar­ily reach read­ers through book­stores any­more, a day which one could say has already come in the past five years?

 

To answer that ques­tion, Shatzkin first recalls what pub­lish­ers did mean to authors. Big chunk here, be sure to read it so we’re on the same page:

The cen­tral propo­si­tion that all pub­lish­ers offered all authors is ”we put books on shelves.” The com­pan­ion real­ity was “you can’t do this by your­self.” … The require­ments to deliver on the promise “to put books on shelves” included the cap­i­tal to invest and spe­cial­ized knowl­edge to turn a man­u­script into inven­tory, a phys­i­cal plant to man­age the ware­hous­ing and ship­ping of those books, and a net­work of rela­tion­ships with the own­ers of the shelves (in the book­stores) to get the right to put your books on those shelves. These were the min­i­mum require­ments to be a pub­lisher. If you had them, you could move on to being smart about select­ing books (in the case of non-fiction, almost always before they were were com­pletely writ­ten), being skilled at devel­op­ing them, being capa­ble of pack­ag­ing them attrac­tively, and being man­agers of another net­work — of review­ers and broad­cast con­ver­sa­tion pro­duc­ers and, more recently, blog­gers and social mega­phones — to bring word of them to the public.

This is gate­keep­ing. Was gate­keep­ing. Behold our new epi­thet: You stink­ing gatekeeper!

I want to flag for you a recent exchange I had with an indus­try par­tic­i­pant after pub­lish­ing Monday’s Ether for Authors at Pub­lish­ing Per­spec­tives, Rumors of the ISBN’s Demise. 

The ISBN issue, for many authors—who would like not to pay the US$250 Bowker charges for a pack of 10 ISBNs (one goes on each format/iteration of a book)—came down to this line from UK-based author Dan Holloway’s com­ment on that col­umn:

What you haven’t spelled out is the way that ISBNs are still being used as a gate­keep­ing mech­a­nism that nar­rows read­ers’ access to the very best, most ground­break­ing lit­er­a­ture because many of the lead­ing lit­er­ary prizes define pos­ses­sion of an ISBN as their def­i­n­i­tion of pub­li­ca­tion for eli­gi­bil­ity purposes.

While in my response to Hol­loway I pointed out that if prize com­mit­tees use the ISBN as a cri­te­rion of eli­gi­bil­ity, this is not the fault of the ISBN admin­is­tra­tion (either in-country or inter­na­tional). What I hope to find out from the inter­na­tional body is how in some coun­tries, such as the United States where Bowker is our des­ig­nated ISBN agency, it has become the case that a cor­po­rate entity is the issuer of the world stan­dard for tag­ging books.

But what, of course, struck me was this use of “gate­keep­ing,” yet again, as the nas­ti­est thing you can say about some­one now. The way we’re going, high schools no longer will ring with the sneer of “you’re so gay” when stu­dents are put out with each other. Instead you’re going to hear “you’re such a gatekeeper.”

 

As I wrote to Hol­loway, I’m tired of peo­ple cry­ing “gatekeeper!” whenever there aren’t enough wolves around to blame things on.

Shatzkin’s writ­ings in par­tic­u­lar always illustrate—even for folks who don’t like his work as a con­sul­tant to the major tra­di­tional publishers—that the effects of gate­keep­ing in the legacy struc­ture of pub­lish­ing were just that, effects of a structure.

 

As I’ve writ­ten before, I’d like to kick the autho­r­ial asses of Stein­beck, Fitzger­ald, Hell­man, and Flem­ing, for starters, for mak­ing us believe they were such movers and shak­ers but allow­ing old pub­lish­ing to develop as such an author-oppressive busi­ness, grossly mater­nal in its obfus­ca­tion: “Don’t worry your pretty lit­tle head about how many books you’ve sold, just eat your roy­al­ties, they’re good for you.”

But maybe because my name’s deriva­tion means, from the Latin por­tar­ius, “keeper of the gate,” I’ve got lit­tle patience these days for this easy swing at every­thing folks don’t like as mere nasty gatekeeping.

 

So put down that pitch­fork and free up your mind to what Shatzkin is say­ing. Because the day may come when a lit­tle gate­keep­ing looks awfully good.

The bar­ri­ers to entry to becom­ing a “book pub­lisher” have col­lapsed, par­tic­u­larly if you’re will­ing to start with ebooks and think of print as an ancil­lary oppor­tu­nity. Google is becom­ing one. Ama­zon became one a long time ago. NBC has become one. The Toronto Star and The New York Times have become ebook pub­lish­ers. And, of course, so have many tens of thou­sands of indi­vid­ual authors, a few of whom are achiev­ing star­tling success.

 

This is a newer com­ment and insight from Shatzkin than it might sound. He’s say­ing that one day Wal­greens may pub­lish a nice line of phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal thrillers; Delta could roll out its own in-flight nov­els; and every lady in your mother’s Tues­day After­noon Bridge Tea Salon now intro­duces her­self to you as an “author.”

Pub­lish­ing will become a func­tion of many enti­ties, not a capa­bil­ity reserved to a few insid­ers who can call them­selves an indus­try. Think about it this way. If you had told every museum and law firm in 1995 that they needed a web page, many would have won­dered “what for?” If you had told them in 2005 that they needed a Face­book pres­ence or in 2008 that they needed a Twit­ter stream, they would have won­dered why. We’ve reached the moment when they all need a pub­lish­ing strat­egy, and that will be as obvi­ous to all these enti­ties in a year or two as web pages, Face­book pages, and Twit­ter streams look now. 

Hugh McGuire, our good col­league who has cre­ated Press­Books, is right here to show us what Shatzkin means. He’s over at O’Reilly Media’s Tools of Change blog with Build­ing an eBook Busi­ness Around Ana­lyt­ics.

In that post, McGuire tells us about Press­Books’ part­ner­ship with AskMen, the 13-year-old mag­a­zine headed by man­ag­ing edi­tor Emma McKay. He writes:

In the year-and-a-bit since Press­Books launched pub­licly, we’ve worked with many tra­di­tional book pub­lish­ers, big and small. But what’s most inter­est­ing to us is non-traditional book pub­lish­ers enter­ing the ebook space, because they have the flex­i­bil­ity to approach book pub­lish­ing in whole new ways.

This is Shatzkin’s point on the hoof. AskMen is pro­duc­ing a line of ebooks meant to answer the needs of its readers.

They’re using data analy­sis as “a dom­i­nant force” to fig­ure out those needs.

McKay is brac­ingly clear on the goal in her inter­view with McGuire: “Give read­ers more of what they’re look­ing for” so adver­tis­ers will follow.

Now, I can tell McGuire and McKay one area in which they’ve already missed a beat.

I checked out one of their new books, Mis­sion: Moti­va­tion for guys who want to stick to a fit­ness reg­i­men for the long haul, not just take a turn on the four-hour Fer­riss wheel. When I down­loaded the sam­ple, I dis­cov­ered that it started with eight pages of “Praise for the Author,” James S. Fell.

A lot of self-publishers can tell you that you pack as many “real” pages of your work into that sam­ple as possible—meaning lose the pro­mo­tional front-matter—to con­vert more sam­plers to buyers.

Hell, one page on the Kin­dle ver­sion sam­ple says noth­ing but “This ebook was pro­duced with http://pressbooks.com.”

UPDATE: Since I pub­lished these com­ments, I’ve heard quickly by Twit­ter from both McGuire and McKay, and the word from McKay is espe­cially gen­er­ous: “You made some very good points and I’m going to be mak­ing some revi­sions ASAP. Thx for the feedback!”

That’s the reac­tion of a good sport and a recep­tive pro at work. As I’d writ­ten, Fell’s writ­ing will sell me with­out the back-page blurbs. He’s good, espe­cially by com­par­i­son to Mr. Four-Hour.

 

And note the lev­el­ing of the play­ing field that even my carping—and McKay’s plucky response—represents: these days, we all know how to appraise an ebook’s structure.

In fact, want to see a mis­take in pro­fes­sional cover design? Check Frank Rose’s The Art of Immer­sion in Read­ing on the Ether below. Notice how you can read nei­ther the title nor the author’s name in an online thumb­nail. By com­par­i­son, look at the strong dis­play of the Mis­sion: Moti­va­tion title on the AskMen cover above: that’s how it’s done.

Finally, it’s true: everybody’s a critic. This is a cousin of Shatzkin’s point.

He calls it “atom­iza­tion” to mean “the dis­per­sal of pub­lish­ing deci­sions and the orig­i­na­tion of pub­lished mate­r­ial from far and wide.”

Atom­iza­tion is ver­ti­cal­iza­tion taken to a newly con­ceiv­able log­i­cal extreme. The self-publishing of authors is already affect­ing the mar­ket­place. But the intro­duc­tion of self-publishing by enti­ties will be much more disruptive.

This won’t thrill the self-publishing authors who think of them­selves as the new center(s) of the uni­verse. But he may be right.

I’m think­ing Jen­nifer Armen­trout meets Lul­ule­mon as a pub­lisher of erotic romance nov­els about Shirt­less Men Kiss­ing Beau­ti­ful Women in Yoga Pants. Who wins that one?

Most self-published fic­tion is crap, but a small per­cent­age of a very large num­ber of self-published nov­els con­sti­tutes a sig­nif­i­cant range of good, cheap choices for fic­tion read­ers, par­tic­u­larly in gen­res. That “dia­monds in the dirt” effect has been becom­ing more and more evi­dent with the pas­sage of time.

 

Using Hugh Howey as his model, our new National Exam­ple of Everything—remember Amanda Hocking?—Shatzkin points out that even the legacy pub­lish­ers’ abil­ity to horn in on grass­roots pub­lish­ing is dry­ing up amid the atom­iza­tion under way.

The pub­lish­ers’ power to use that capa­bil­ity to com­mand a share of the “easy” (no inven­tory invest­ment or sales force required) money from ebooks, which was a sine qua non for them until very recently, is evaporating.

In Can Pub­lish­ers Mat­ter? Peter Turner fol­lows Shatzkin’s essay:

I believe this is  an exis­ten­tial chal­lenge fac­ing gen­eral trade pub­lish­ers because it relates directly to the value pub­lish­ers deliver authors and readers.

He uses the chart that many of us have picked up from Bowker (I found myself using it at Writer Unboxed), show­ing the ter­rific tum­ble of in-store sales in the States since 2010, with some 44 per­cent of the action now hap­pen­ing online.

And while con­ced­ing that many pub­lish­ers are work­ing on devel­op­ing the kind of direct-marketing exper­tise that McKay dis­cusses with McGuire—widely con­sid­ered one of the few hopes they have for get­ting around the “atom­iza­tion” at hand—Turner writes of the kind of mis­giv­ings many oth­ers see in the old gatekeepers:

I just don’t believe these strate­gies will demon­strate sales in a way that will impress authors, sat­isfy read­ers, or–most impor­tant of all–yield the nec­es­sary con­sumer data that will allow for the nec­es­sary mar­ket­ing agility and scal­a­bil­ity. Since book sales are flat and mar­ket share is being atom­ized, the dis­counts demanded by third-party eCom­merce retail­ers are a pro­found bar­rier to the mar­gins nec­es­sary for sur­viv­ing the tran­si­tion that eCom­merce demands.

 

And Shatzkin, for his part, isn’t ready to say that legacy pub­lish­ing is fully over the side.

There are ways to mar­ket to “known book buy­ers” that are increas­ingly going to be the prop­erty of enti­ties that have devel­oped lists and tech­niques at scale.…it is likely that the machin­ery of the biggest book pub­lish­ing orga­ni­za­tion (or two) will be required for a very long time to max­i­mize the biggest com­mer­cial poten­tial, like “Fifty Shades of Grey.”

But note that what he’s describ­ing is the cap­i­tal­iza­tion by a pub­lisher on a suc­cess that enters the field from “out­side” the indus­try, in that case fanny fiction.

 

This “atom­iza­tion” con­cept has legs. The struc­tured indus­try, not just its supremacy in books, is what’s com­ing apart.

With­out a robust “book trade”, from which trade pub­lish­ing gets its name, there can­not be com­mer­cially robust trade pub­lish­ing, at least not as we have known it…The atom­iza­tion I think may be the over­ar­ch­ing trend of the next decade or two.

Click to read this week’s full Writ­ing on the Ether col­umn at JaneFriedman.com.

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