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There will never be a return to qual­ity but a steady decline as the crap mer­chants pile on higher and higher. Suc­cess will become more and more random.

This is our good col­league Bal­dur Bjar­na­son writ­ing about an issue a lot of us hes­i­tate to address head-on.

One of the con­se­quences of any­body being able to pub­lish is that every­body can pub­lish, not just the wor­thy few who big pub­lish­ing never got around to or those who were a lit­tle bit too weird, inno­v­a­tive, or unique for an edi­tor to take a risk.

In a post titled with bale­ful accu­racy Schlock, Bjar­na­son — an Ice­lander based in Lon­don — looks hard at an aspect of dig­i­tally enabled con­tent abun­dance that many of us rou­tinely duck.

The biggest ben­e­fi­cia­ries of open, free, and equi­table access to pub­lish­ing tools will never be skilled writ­ers, read­ers with taste, or any­body who sells a qual­ity good, but the pur­vey­ors of mass-manufactured schlock and buy­ers who either don’t mind it, or can’t tell the difference.

Part of the wide­spread ret­i­cence to address this as forth­rightly as Bjar­na­son does is a kind of polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness, of course. We live in an age in which it’s not cool to speak ill of one’s fellow…you name it, employ­ees, church mem­bers, class­mates, par­ents, authors, pub­lish­ers, edi­tors, agents, at least not in pub­lic. Only in Direct Messages.

The truth-killing dic­tum “If you can’t say any­thing nice, don’t say any­thing at all” was not, to my sur­prise, con­fined to my own Deeply South­ern upbring­ing. There’s a wide­spread fear of crit­i­cism, much more potent in Amer­i­can soci­ety than in most Euro­pean cul­tures I’ve lived in for any length of time. We’re coun­seled never to speak ill of anybody.

But how­ever cor­dially such instruc­tion is intended, mind you, it looks like fool­ish polite­ness when some­one like Bjar­na­son calmly points out the emperor’s schlocky clothes.

The $5,000 bonus to which he refers here, of course, is the one announced for U.S. Ran­dom House employ­ees because of the suc­cess of Fifty Shades of You Know What. Bjar­na­son writes:

That $5000 bonus might well be the her­ald of a brave new world, not a world where big pub­lish­ers think that rebadged fan fic­tion is the next big thing…but a world where help­ing any­body and every­body who man­ages to have some suc­cess to scale is their biggest source of revenue.

— Bring us your intel­lec­tual manure, your algo-generated pap, your generic schlock, and we can lever­age your suc­cess into mas­sive prof­its for us both!

Speak­ing of lever­age, Bjar­na­son would not shy from, I think, my descrip­tion of him as a fire­brand, albeit for the right rea­sons. Like a white-hatted hacker, he likes to point out weak­nesses of process and per­spec­tive in the indus­try! the industry!

He tends to dis­turb some with this because he gen­er­ally has a good point to make.

What does this all mean?

Sim­ple. If you are try­ing to sell a good book you have to earn your cus­tomers one by one and learn how to treat them well enough for them to return to buy your next book.

It’s a slow-going task, full of hard work and few rewards, but it’s the only sus­tain­able tac­tic in a mar­ket that is increas­ingly dom­i­nated by randomness.

Worse:

It’s also a tac­tic that doesn’t scale. It can work well for indi­vid­u­als and small– to medium-sized pub­lish­ers, but the direct sell­ing nec­es­sary isn’t eas­ily scal­able to the lev­els needed to sus­tain a large corporation.

What you might find makes this lat­est essay from Bjar­na­son espe­cially potent is that there’s a such a pro­foundly blind side to our inter­na­tional pub­lish­ing hive.

Every­thing that makes a crap book crap also makes it a more con­ta­gious idea on a social network.

We’re bound together by social media and yet, for the most part, we don’t really know who can write, and who can’t; who can edit, and who just says he can; who can really mar­ket a book and who’s just retool­ing plat­i­tudes swiped from peo­ple named Seth and Tony and Anne.

Crap is grasped at a glance, its actual con­tent is so scant that it can be boiled down to tweet­able catch phrases.

Do blog entries reveal literary-fiction tal­ent? Maybe.

Good books have no god-given right to exist.

Do art­ful tweets promise inci­sive non­fic­tion? Possibly.

There is no rea­son on earth why a mar­ket should auto­mat­i­cally give good books the space they need to survive.

Do we really know who we’re talk­ing to? Nah.

The dynam­ics of free-access dig­i­tal mar­kets favour rubbish.

If any­thing, the “democ­ra­tiz­ing” ele­ments of the web’s Mous­que­taire-ish com­mu­nity ethos wel­comes all to the table. Its egal­i­tar­i­an­ism is blink­ered to such top­ics that dare not speak their name: tal­ent, genius, the gen­eral paucity of both. Writ­ers of beautiful-dead-girl romance for young women are greeted as the peers of human­i­tar­ian essayists.

Toxic ide­olo­gies and world-views stand out more eas­ily and are grasped more eas­ily than con­sid­ered opinions.

This all makes for happy rela­tions in the dig­i­tal mar­ket­place. Here amid the dings and dumps of the dig­i­tal dis­rup­tion, we are a happy, happy crew, aren’t we?

Online com­mu­ni­ties are aller­gic to nuance and sub­tlety. Orig­i­nal­ity can­not be con­densed down to a tweet­able descrip­tion. Any­thing that faith­fully rep­re­sents the com­plex­ity of human life and thought is tram­pled into the ground by the pan­dered herd.

While keep­ing watch over our flocks by night, it’s good to have a Bjar­na­son ever near us. Remind­ing us that once we were about qual­ity, and busi­ness, too, surely, but the busi­ness of find­ing and pro­mot­ing qual­ity. Lit­er­ary quality.

Is that what we’re about today?

Dif­fer­ence needs to be hand-sold, one by one. Or, it needs to be lucky, rely­ing on the whims of randomness. Neither way is reli­able and nei­ther is easy.

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