On Wednesday, April 25, 2018 at 9:07:37 AM UTC-4, Richard Hershberger wrote:
[snip]
Post by Richard HershbergerAs for those indie authors, the key is that they are cranking out
the material. The discussions I have read among them talk in terms of
producing three or four novels a year.
Well, as Dean Wesley Smith wrote in the linked article:
"Selling one genre book a year is not enough to make a living writing."
Unless, I assume, you are a genuine bestseller or your definition of
"making a living" differs from Smith's ("$6,000 per month after taxes
needed to survive [for a family]".)
Post by Richard HershbergerIn other words, this is the modern equivalent of pulp fiction. Bully
for them, but as a reader I take this as fair warning.
As part of our effort to keep the ISFDB current, I have been exposed to
a fair amount of indie writing over the last few years. It ranges from
"professional quality" to literally "gibberish".
Post by Richard HershbergerI understand why writers don't want publishers as gatekeepers. As
a reader, I most definitely want a gatekeeper.
Traditional publishers provide a variety of services -- editing,
printing, art, advertising, distribution, etc -- to readers and writers,
including gatekeeping. They basically offer a "bundle" the way cable TV
channels are bundled. As an author, you can't pick and choose which
services you want a traditional publisher to sell to you just like you
can't buy only the channels that you are interested in from a cable
TV provider. Or at least that's how it worked in the past, before the
indie, i.e. "a la carte", model became viable and created new pressures
on the traditional side. In a way, it is similar to how streaming has
disrupted the cable TV model.
As far as gatekeeping goes, I see two separate issues here. The first one
is simply a matter of finding the stuff that you are interested in. There
are thousands of new SF books added to the Amazon database every month,
so it's not feasible to check all of them out. There are numerous ways
around this problem, but things are still in a state of flux (vide
Amazon's continuing problems with fake and low quality reviews.) It will
be interesting to see how reviews will evolve over the next few years.
The other thing about gatekeeping is that it is a feedback mechanism
which (in theory) helps aspiring authors improve until they become
publishable. Perhaps the fact that authors no longer need to clear
this hurdle hurts some of them in the long run. I am not sure how we
could quantify the impact, though.