I Don't Actually Know Anything, and other clarifications

Since last week's post, I've been called a few things: naive, idealistic, antidemocratic, elitist, snobbish, ignorant, out of touch. Most of these conversations were in person, though one especially good one took place on someone else's blog. It's okay. My self-confidence can weather it (not really, but whatever, if I can write it, I'm halfway onboard). If I express passionate opinions with fighting words, I should well expect to get passionate, fighting words in return. That's discussion, and it's valuable. But so it was that I linked my vitriolic post elsewhere and was smacked down so righteously and with such eloquence and erudition that I ended up profusely apologizing for my pea-brained conceits before drinking a whole bottle of prosecco and intermittently weeping into my pillow for fears of my future for several hours until I finally fell asleep. It wasn't even that harsh! But being a person in transition is taking a pretty heady toll on my security in what I try to think, write, and do; and there's never really been that much space between comfortable confidence and crippling self-doubt for me, anyway.

I'm also getting a bit too old to plead the newbie defense. I'm not just a kid anymore, and there are things I should know better by now. Central among these is my tendency to assume altruistic motives in people (to such a degree as to constitute a character flaw). Over the years, I've thought a lot of hilariously stupid things, like "These drug addicts want to be my friend!" or "My foster family loves me!" or "Insurance companies want what's best for people!" or "I can do anything I set my heart on!" Life's rough, innit? Last week, it was "Books get published because enough people think they are good!"

No: Books get published when the amount of time (money) invested in them is calculated to at least match the returns on that investment. The man who schooled me said it best: "The gatekeepers of publishing are not altruistic protectors of high culture, they are sellers of pop (as well as high) culture whose primary motivation is making a living from their profits." Whether something can sell, or whether it is good, are two entirely different things. Plenty of great writing never sees print because people think it won't sell; and plenty of crap gets published because people think it will.

Last week, I wrote that people's opinions of navigating a post-publishing world would have a lot to do with "how much time you've spent with unpublishable writing"; and when I said "unpublishable" I meant "shitty." This was stupid and unfair. More to the issue, it betrays my inexperience: clearly I have not spent enough time with unpublishable writing to know that some of it well deserves publication. When self-published authors complain that no traditional press would give them the time of day, it's wrong for me to assume that the reason has to do with the quality of the work they've done.

The "rule of the few" that I found myself defending is not merit-based. A more democratic medium, glut or no, better allows what is good to rise to the surface. For me to say, as I did, that editors and publishers "facilitate good decision making for the general public" disparages the perfectly apt faculties of judgment many readers possess, and it rings like the same sort of anti-populist, anti-Internet grousing I criticized in Keillor's op-ed. Still, I value the work of reviewers who have the talent and expertise requisite to furnish my powers of discrimination with greater detail. When I go to a bookstore, or to Amazon, or to the library, my decisions about what to read are easier and more informed because those writers do the work that they do, and while their judgment isn't something I'd substitute for my own, it's certainly a helpful supplement. Sure, reviewers have their darlings, backscratchers, and check-writers, but I'm still inclined to believe that they provide a service in the public interest. An extension of this logic holds, though, that the best and most honest reviewers actually come from outside the publishing industry. Independent book bloggers are, for example, less concerned with their images as public dictators of taste (or with quid pro quo) than they are with promoting the works they feel deserve promotion. In short, the prettiest flowers aren't always in the walled garden.

For all this, though, I still have trouble shaking my prejudice against self-published literature. Earlier this year, Virginia Heffernan argued in the New York Times that "it's hard to remember the stigma that once attached to self-publishing." The article features a quote from IndieReader (an online distributor for self-published books) encouraging readers to "think of these books like handmade goods, produced in small numbers, instead of the mass-marketed stuff you’d find at a superstore.” I'm not sure I agree that the quality of craftsmanship we typically associate with handmade goods is present in the product pushed by self-publishing companies. The analogy strikes me as a little bit misleading. Self-publishing companies may publish fewer books per author, but they're still mass-producing a ton of books for as wide a profit margin as they can. And the product is a far cry from the beauty and originality of the hand-hewn that IndieReader intends to evoke. Still, it's what's inside that counts; and I have my doubts about that, too.

Perhaps there's more to be said for dodging the gatekeeper boondoggle than I had originally thought, but based on my (admittedly limited) experience with self-published work, quality control in self-publishing remains a concern for me. Part of what I mean by "quality control" implies, minimally, the number of people who look over an entire manuscript before it turns into published material.

Consider, as an example, the several-step process of academic publishing: once a manuscript (MS) has been tapped for publication, an outside reader (sometimes an expert in the subject of the work) verifies the validity and relevance of the author's arguments and may make various alterations or suggestions to the work; the author might then get the MS back and then submit a revised version; the revised version of the MS then undergoes copy- or line-editing and fact-checking, usually by at least two editors who look it over several times; the MS is then returned to the author, who reviews the copyediting and suggests final changes to the work; the MS is then passed along to the publisher, who manages the layout, typesetting, house copyediting, etc.; the publisher then sends the MS (now in proof form) back to the managing editor, who in turn passes the proof to the copyeditors and to the author, who may or may not make final changes before the work finally goes to print. My point is this: by the time the manuscript reaches the point of mass distribution, it has been reviewed by no fewer than five people (excluding the author), many of whom have gone over the work with a fine-toothed comb more than once. It's not a hassle-free process—it's time-consuming, there's a lot of back-and-forth, and sometimes feathers are ruffled—but at the end of it all, the author has the satisfaction of knowing that the work published under his or her name is the best that he or she is capable of, and oftentimes these writers are outspokenly grateful for everyone's efforts.

If self-publishing authors were to seek out the same level of pre-production scrutiny for their manuscripts, it would be at their own expense, which means it usually doesn't happen. As such, circumventing the middlemen also means circumventing the refinery of the editorial process. In my opinion, it's everyone's loss when that happens. I take no joy in reading a book with misused or misspelled words, decorative punctuation, characters whose names change, or other common mistakes. The text should never be an obstacle to the experience of reading it. Honestly, when I see a row of exclamation points, I assume the author does not read widely. When I see an egregious error, I assume the author doesn't even read or revise her own work. And when I see enough of these authors all frothing at the mouth for me to read their books, it makes me fear for a future in which everybody's talking but nobody's listening.

Time will tell, I suppose. Meanwhile, I'm done spreading my know-nothing around. Until next week.