Flametoad

Back in late March, a gentleman by the name of Jon Noring posted an opinion piece called Our “Publish Then Filter’”Future… in the ebook-community Yahoo group. In a nutshell, his point is that technology is taking us away from a traditional “filter then publish” model in which publishers act as quality-control gatekeepers to a “publish then filter” model in which authors are frequently their own “publishers” and audience filtering happens after the fact.

When it comes to creative works, we in the Western world live in an economy of plenty. The problem isn’t finding a book, story, poem, or song, it’s finding one worth the investment of our time. Time is our most valuable commodity, and it’s non-renewable. This point was recently brought come to me as I started listening to 8 gigbytes of free music being legally distributed via Bittorrent. The music in question is a showcase of bands who performed at SXSW. The collection contains more than 700 songs in all, and I have been slowly working my way through each one.

It has been an eye-opening, and ear-bending, experience.

 Presumably the songs in this collection were not picked completely artibrarily. For instance, one would assume that they belong to artists who were chosen to perform at SXSW. Those bands, in turn, were selected from hundreds of potentials due to some artistic merit. Thus, already some filtering has already occurred. Very few tracks suck outright. Instead, it’s an exercise in mediocracy. Even setting aside the obvious fact that some genres don’t appeal to me, many of the songs that remain are merely “okay”.

I submit that mediocracy is the enemy of literature.

 The economy of plenty extends far beyond literature. Already, reading as a pastime is under siege from the internet, TV, movies, and other forms of media. I enjoy reading, but when I hit a book that’s only mediocre, my reading drops from a book a week to a book a month or longer. It’s a lot easier to find other things to do when the book you’re reading isn’t a page turner. If we are to sustain a literate society (and some would argue that that battle is already lost) then the overall quality of literature needs to improve. Every book that doesn’t drill into the reader’s brain may as well be an invitation to leave literature for more engaging forms of media.

Fortunately, listening to fewer than a thousand songs is a lot easier and less time consuming than sampling an ocean of self-published novels. If I had to read a slush pile to find an occasional genuine gem, I’d probably turn to some other form of entertainment. Filters are absolutely an essential part of our creative space. Robert McHenry of the Encyclopedia Britannica blog recently wrote an essay called Am I My Brother’s Web 2.0 Gatekeeper, in which he said:  

The thing is, there has always been too much information. That is to say, there has always been a great deal of bad information, or badly presented information, along with the good and the well done. So there has always been a role for the person who had the ability to separate the wheat from the chaff and the temerity to consign the chaff to oblivion. Small wonder that the producers of chaff are irritated.

So if Jon Norning’s prediction comes true (shudder) and authors bypass the slush pile then the market itself becomes a giant slush pile. Even Norning clearly states that some sort of filtering has to take place. If the role of the traditional publiser falls away (and I’m not convinced that it will) then the next logical choke point is distribution. Self “publishing” your great American novel is great, but if the major distribution points won’t accept it then your audience is limited to the people who visit your blog. Another logical filter would be the book reviewer. In a world drowning in e-books, Amazon-style reader reviews would become increasingly important. Over time, buyers might even learn to trust “celebrity” reviewers with tastes similar to their own. In that scenario, authors who are unable to get their books reviewed may as well have not written them. As an e-book publisher, I can attest to just how powerful a good (or bad) review can be.

We live in intersting times. Certainly some paradigms are changing. Yet I wouldn’t be too quick to sound the death knell of the publishing-then-filter model. I, for one, would pay a premium for the assurance that the book I was picking up had been filtered for basic grammar, an engaging plot, and interesting characters. Heck, I’d settled for two out of three. 

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