TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Self-publishing, E-books, and Legitimacy: Part 3 of a series

By Paul Biba

Editor’s note: Here is Part Three of Luke Bergeron’s series from his blog mispeled. Two more parts are on the way. – Paul Biba

Today we’ll hear from Levi Montgomery, a self-published writer who also blogs at The Write Rants. Levi was gracious enough to allow me to post his opinions here, and I appreciate it. So, without further ado:

The biggest single barrier to the wide-spread acceptance of self-published books is the staunch voice of the traditional publishing industry, crying in the wilderness: “But you need us! We protect you from the riff-raff!” The argument is that the industry performs a valuable service, acting as a gatekeeper to the public square, keeping trashy novels, misinformation, and radical error from being published.

This argument is rife with errors of its own, not the least of which is the assumption that traditional publishers do, indeed, act in such a manner; that they keep worthless fiction and incorrect non-fiction from making it to market. However, rather than shoot the half-dead fish in that particular barrel, I’d like to address another point: the issue of whether such a gate-keeping service should be performed at all, or if we, as a society, even want such a service.

The argument that this is a valuable service of the publishing industry would seem to be based on the putative existence of some sort of qualitative analysis of input, and would seem to derive its justification in keeping the perceived value of published output above some acceptable minimum level (both of which are arguable, but there are those half-dead fish again). But who is it that decides? Who decides that a book isn’t good enough for me to read, if not me? How do I decide, unless the book can reach me?

The underlying assumption in any gatekeeping function of the publishing industry is that the very reason publishing exists as an industry at all is that this function was so vitally needed that the walls were built around the machinery, to protect us all from those who might dare use it to voice a disagreement. But the fact is that the industry exists because the machinery became so large, so complex, so valuable, that publishing was outside the reach of all but the select few.

When publishing was a matter of standing in front of a large enough audience and telling a story, publishing could be assayed by literally anyone. If a storyteller wanted to tell a story, he did so. If he was good enough at it, he got the accolades and respect of his audience, and perhaps even payment, in the form of food, shelter, etc. The developments of technology, beginning with written languages, continuing through such crude printing technologies as woodblock and hand-cast metal type, and eventually reaching block-long high-speed web-fed printing presses, took this immediate access away from the average storyteller. Now, in order to put his story in the hands of his audience, the storyteller had to do one of two things. He had to acquire a printing press, or he had to go to someone who had one.

There were, perhaps unfortunately, more storytellers than the printers could handle, and they (like all industries) learned how to say no. The perceived function of the owners of the printing presses as a gatekeeper has its actual origin right there: the printers simply could not hope to publish everything. Nor could they hope to attract all the readers in the world, and in an attempt to differentiate their services from those of their competitors, they began to add what they perceived as value. They added editing. They added color. They added illustrations. And they added snobbery.

But the question remains unanswered: do we want a gatekeeper to the public square? Do we want a not-so-disinterested third party telling us what we can and cannot read? Remember the fireside? Remember the storyteller who stood there, regaling his audience with the story of how he conquered a saber-tooth? Aren’t we capable of deciding for ourselves whether we want to spend our time listening to him? I said that if he was good enough, he got respect and accolades. What I didn’t say was that if he wasn’t good enough, he got ignored. He lost his audience. He either stood by the dying fire alone and spoke on and on to nothing and nobody, or he went home and hoed his potatoes. His publishing career was over. Market forces did him in, not some gatekeepers somewhere, standing with crossed lances, turning him away.

And make no mistake, the problem of selectivity in publishing is not new. Since Og the Mighty first sat by the fire and told of how he’d killed a mammoth single-handedly, there have been people telling bad fiction and erroneous non-fiction. The night after Og told his story, there was another fire, smaller, lesser-known, and at that fire Ig the Skinny tried on Og’s story. He got laughed at.

Edward R. Murrow rather famously said “Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn’t mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.” But it doesn’t mean your audience is any dumber, either. Search the web long enough, and you will find a website telling you the best thing to do for a burn is to put butter on it. Bad advice, of course, but is it proof that the web is creating bad advice? No, because I have a book, printed in 1923, that says exactly the same thing. Did the famous gatekeepers keep that out of the hands of the unsuspecting public then? No. Do they do so now? No.

When Og told his story, we all believed him because we all knew him, and when Ig stole the story the next night, we all laughed at him because we all knew him. So what’s the problem we face today? Bad information? No.

Rule Number One, life’s General Order Number One, is “Always identify the problem.” You can’t fix it until you know what’s broken, and what’s broken today is simply this: we don’t all know Og and Ig any more. We can be heard to the ends of the Earth and beyond, we can listen to the voices of people we will never meet, and we have no way of telling the truth from the fiction. The village has grown too big.

So how do we fix that? We apply the same forces we’ve had since the days of Og and Ig. We have tools at our disposal that can handle the tasks. We have market forces to separate good fiction from bad, and we have peer review to separate truth from falsehood in the arena of non-fiction. These are not new tools, and they are neither inherent in, nor dependent upon, the function of the traditional presses as gatekeepers to the public square.

The fact is that, while publishers have been guarding the gates, technology has torn down the walls, leaving them looking suspiciously like the keepers of the toll gate in Blazing Saddles. You no longer need a printing press, you no longer need a distribution system, and you no longer need to stand in line at the gate. There are POD services galore that are more than eager to put out your book. If you want to tell, in excruciating detail, every minute and every second of the life of your grandmother, you can. For free. If you want to revive the old adage of butter on a burn, you can.

And do we want the owners of the presses to keep us from reading these things, or do we want something more robust, more reliable? Do we perhaps simply need to take out the same old tools, market forces and peer review, and let them do their jobs?

The question of legitimacy in self-published books is not a new question, it is simply an old question taken to a new arena. The answer is the same answer. The tools are the same tools.

Consider the illogic in saying that a “book” shouldn’t be published, unless it has the approval of the traditional publishing house, and then not extending that ban to all other forms of saying whatever it is that the “book” says.

Suppose I write a long series of blog posts, telling the story of John And Jane And How They Fell In Love And Lived Happily Ever After. Suppose that this series of posts is poorly written, filled with bad diction, bad syntax, bad grammar, empty similes and mixed metaphors, cardboard characters, sad clichés, and all of the other boogymen of modern fiction. I’m just a bad storyteller. I’m deluded and arrogant, and I have no audience, but no one is going to say that there should be some concerted effort to keep me off the web.

Suppose I build a website that claims to give medical advice, and I tell people to put butter on burns. So what? There are a million places on the web giving bad medical advice. It’s just another quack website.

But suppose I have the audacity to publish either of those as a POD book. Now I need to be kept out of the public square, somehow. Someone needs to Do Something. But what changed? Nothing. I simply chose to make a “book” out of my bad story or my bad advice.

The problem (remembering Rule Number One) is not keeping such things out of the hands of the public, it is separating the chaff from the wheat, in all channels of communication. And the answer is to apply the same tools that served us so well before the owners of the printing presses built their walls.

Market forces and peer review.

Fiction is easy. If you want to publish it, publish it. When no one buys it, go hoe your potatoes. End of story.

Non-fiction is a little bit more difficult, but the tools are there. There’s a long-standing tradition of peer review, and it simply needs to adapt to the new technologies. There was no magic bullet to keep the butter-on-a-burn meme out of our wetware a century ago, and somehow we all survived. When a better meme came along, peer review, in the form of doctors voicing their opposition, killed off the old one. There’s no fundamental reason why that can’t work in self-published book, both ebooks and print books. In fact, it may become easier and easier over time as technologies adapt.

What we most assuredly no not need is a return to the accidental rise of the press owners as gatekeepers.

Levi can be reached at levi@levimontgomery.com or at The Write Rants.

Thanks for reading. Tomorrow we’ll hear from a contact from inside a major New York Publishing house.

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