Gatekeepers – You Choose – Publishers or Readers? by Chris Longmuir
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about gatekeepers, and who
decides what readers should be allowed to read. I suppose this has been
instigated by the Hachette/Amazon dispute, with Hachette wanting to maintain
high prices for their e-books and Amazon stubbornly resisting this in favour of
a discounting model. Now, I’m not going to get into an argument of who’s right
and who’s wrong, let the big boys slug it out. However, the niggling thoughts
about gatekeepers keep on invading my mind.
It has long been accepted that publishers are the
gatekeepers, but is this a good thing? It is generally accepted that in order
to be accepted by a publisher a book has to be well written and that the badly
written books will be weeded out. Excuse me for a moment while I have a snort
of derision as I think about Fifty Shades
of Grey and all those celebrity memoirs. You see, it’s not really about
quality. It’s about money, and whether the book will sell in sufficiently large
amounts to earn the publishers shed loads of cash.
Thinking back to when my saga A Salt Splashed Cradle was rejected by one of the big publishers –
a book which is now selling very well and is popular with readers, thank you
very much – the rejection was on the basis that historical sagas had gone out
of fashion. Now this book had survived the many layers of the RNA (Romantic
Novelist Society) probation scheme for new writers which involved the thumbs up
from three different professional readers and placement with the said
publisher. So, to be rejected on the basis of changing fashion in the world of
readers was, looking back on it, strange. Did all the saga readers suddenly
stop reading this genre overnight? Or was the publisher acting as a dictator,
deciding what readers could or could not read? I would lay bets it was nothing
to do with what readers wanted and more to do with sagas not bringing in as
much money as the other genres. Was any thought given to the devoted saga
readers? No, they would just have to make do with whatever the publisher
dictated was the new fashion in reading.
The same thing happens when a publisher decides a mid list
author is no longer reaching the publisher’s ever increasing targets. They are
dropped without any thought given to the readers who may be waiting anxiously
for that author’s next book.
This poses the question – should publishers be the
gatekeepers? Or should the industry allow their readers to be the gatekeepers?
Somehow, I can’t see that happening because, as I said, it’s all about money
and profit. So perhaps it’s just as well the gatekeepers are getting
competition from the independent authors who are very aware of who are the most
important people in the publishing equation. The readers.
Chris Longmuir
Comments
I am pretty sure my teen/YA historical adventures would hardly have reached readers at all without a publisher's backing. In fact, now I've done all my backlist as ebooks, I can see that I have 2 books that sell themselves, possibly another 4 that might sell if I did some advertising, and the rest are a niche market that only shift occasional copies and might as well have been rejected at the gate. It's making me think very hard about what I write next, and in this respect maybe authors will end up being their own gatekeepers?