Building Trust Out of Nothing At All posted by Martin

In every industry where there is a large pool of people wanting a career there is a system of gatekeeping. Without it any jerk on the street could walk in and claim to be an insider. With it the people who think they may be deserving but don’t have the talent can be sent away, the people with genuine talent can be allowed in, and the people who have possibility but are not yet professional enough to gain entry can be rebuked with advice in the hopes that they’ll keep storming the gates.

The danger, from the outsiders perspective, is to view this as a monolithic estate, when it’s more like a city. It has risen through the uncoordinated and selfish actions of thousands of people. The human mind, always seeking patterns and simplification, groups that city into one unit in order to make sense of it. This has the unfortunate side effect of making whatever industry the outsider aspires to appear as if it is conspiring against them, when in reality the different parts of the city are relatively unaware of the actions in the other part, and rarely collude on who should be kept outside the gates.

But despite the many ways of gaining access, each point of entry has its own gatekeeper. Internships, mailroom, workshops, convoluted submissions processes — ways to pay your dues.

This gatekeeping is a matter of trust. The reader picking up a book or magazine trusts that certain editorial standards are met. That certain hoops have been jumped through. That the author has been vetted and, even if you don’t like the work, can string sensible words together into meaningful sentences.

This matter of trust is born from professionalism. You could publish a book or magazine all in Comic Sans and laid out by monkeys running Windows Me, you could print two million books with Stephenie Meyers name on the front and inside a transcript of the OJ Trial, but you’d be wasting a heck-of-a-lot of money. Professionalism means creating works that amateurs can’t easily achieve. It means delivering the promise of the book cover. Or, at the very least, delivering a really cool cover.

Stubborn outsiders will sometimes take matters into their own hands, and historically this has been a sign that the quality of their work is suspect. Ask any agent or publisher in the industry just how well self-publishing works for the majority of authors. It’s exactly because that level of trust is missing because more than likely, the quality is going to sub-professional. We all can list exceptions, but the advice has always been against the desire to DIY if you want to make a living at it.

But now we’re at one of the most crucial times in history in terms of ease of access. Distribution of textual matter to a worldwide audience is completely trivial. Whether you do it in longer form or 140 characters at a time, everybody who lives in a reasonably well-off country can publish any of their own work at any time where the majority of the educated world can easily access it.

The problem is not distribution, the problem is getting found, and trust. We need a trust system.

The cost of a traditional trust system is high. The percentage of cost to authors higher still. While the publishing industry is traditionally better than the music industry, the publisher of a bestseller will make out better than the author when it comes time to balance the books. Of course, there is a business built on that margin. Hard and soft costs, distribution and promotion, public relations, returns, rent on a New York city address. There are agent’s and lawyer’s percentages for the role in gatekeeping, much of it well-deserved.

In the graphic design world of mid-to-late Twentieth Century, the labor was distributed across many professions. The designer was in charge of vision. She would layout the advertisement and order the copy block from the typesetter. She’d order the photographic separations from the imagesetter. She’d paste the whole thing up and give it to be photographed and printed. Now, one designer does all of those tasks, and more, on one computer.

I think the same will be true of the writers. Today’s writers need to be editors. They need to be marketers. They need to think of the whole project not just in terms of the words, but every aspect of it. Which is not to say that editors and marketers and agents will disappear or be made unnecessary, but as the revenues from publishing are less, so the cast of characters that it supports will be lesser still.

But less money to the industry does not necessarily mean less money to the author. A self-published author, who has a reasonable following, has all the distribution they need. The payment systems are nascent, but emerging. The one-author empire age is dawning.

But we’re lacking the trust system. The trust system that will allow readers who are willing to buy the confidence to invest in authors they’ve never heard of. The trust system that a reader who is unfamiliar with a particular writer is willing to take a risk of a few dollars and try their work.

The answer, seems to be, in publishing and word of mouth. Publishing yourself and publishing often. Yes, a thousand authors do this already, many using blogging as a marketing and promotion tool — a way to build an audience before or after they approach traditional markets.

But I mean authors who publish their work online in defiance of the old gatekeepers. Authors who are willing to forgo traditional routes to success in experiments towards future potential success. If they’re good enough, people will find them and recommend them. They’ll build an audience. Maybe they’ll publish traditionally, or maybe they’ll find a way to keep everything self-controlled. Someday, some author like that will get a lot of attention and make a decent amount of money. Then, it will become the new norm. Thousands will copy their model. A new gatekeeping will arise.

When that happens, the idea of the systems created for the current distribution will be unnecessary, and remembered only as we remember mimeograph machines or metal type. So long as the world of words and ideas continue — and it will — the infrastructures of publishing can follow the business model it spawned into a slow, decadent decline.

Illustration by Christine Marie Larsen

Comments (0) — Category: Publishing