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 p...