Gatekeepers

We all rely on gatekeepers.  There are too many books too read, too many songs to listen to, too many potential employees, too many potential lovers and too much information for any of us to evaluate all ourselves.  Gatekeepers narrow our choices.

But gatekeepers restrict choice.  Gatekeepers eliminate options we never get to consider.  The history of Western civilization – of which I'm a fan – is of the democratization of the gates.  (I know this is happening and has happened in other civilizations as well.)

The best example is the invention of the printing press and the spread of literacy including the dangerous idea that everyone can interpret the Bible for himself and, even more radical at the time, herself. Religious tolerance is another example: we don't eliminate everybody of another religion from consideration for whatever.  The separation of science from religion removed priests as mandatory gatekeepers of knowledge. Social mobility brought gates crashing down.

College admissions offices are gatekeepers for lazy HR departments.  I hate to tell anyone who hired me on the basis of my Harvard diploma but studying and learning were optional after admission, at least in the early sixties when I was there.  A "gentleman's C" was easy to achieve even if you couldn't get up early enough for classes which were largely taught in the morning.  When I was at Microsoft, I was amazed to see the unit I ran running an ad for testers that said a college degree was required.  "This means you wouldn't consider Bill Gates," I explained when I removed the requirement.  (Bill actually would have been a lousy tester – too impatient and he would have tested against what he thought the product should do rather than what the spec said it was supposed to do.)

The Internet is the printing press of our day.  It expands choice.  It doesn't eliminate the need for gatekeepers because we have even more potential input to filter.  But it does create an avenue around traditional gatekeepers and enable more democratic choices.  On eBay you can buy from or sell to people you would never have heard of otherwise – and you can look at the online reputation of the person you're about to transact with.  You can gather music and movie suggestions from bloggers whose tastes seem to be similar to yours.  You can search information in wikipedia or Google and what you get back reflects a consensus – not necessarily "the truth" even assuming there is such a thing – but a consensus.  You can use the folksonomy tags on del.icio.us as filters.

Now that I am in the process of self-publishing my novel hackoff.com: an historic murder mystery set in the Internet bubble and rubble, I’m finding – not surprisingly - that traditional publishers are still very potent gatekeepers. Obviously, making a book available for free download as I am doing at hackoff.com means that the access to a physical press is no longer a gate between writers and readers who are willing to read online or download PDFs.  The technologies of print on demand make self-publishing of physical books affordable to almost anyone who can take the time to write one.  Distribution through Amazon is easy to achieve.

But “respectability” still comes from having your book printed by a traditional publisher even though those publishers rarely promote the work of debut writers and frown on free Internet distribution.  This respectability is important because with respectability comes reviews. One web publisher of mystery reviews tells me he can’t review online books or PDFs or he’d “be swamped.”  He is letting traditional publishers be his gatekeeper and he is the gatekeeper for those who read his reviews.

Book publicists, even those who claim web expertise, shy away from the possible taint of self-published books.  They are letting publishers be their gatekeepers.

I was delighted when I heard about blog tours, a virtual version of the traditional book tour on which authors do guest posts and take questions on cooperating blogs.  I was amazed to find that a prominent operator of blog tours does not accept self-published books for the tour.  WTF?  All bloggers are self-publishers.  Allowing traditional publishers to be the gatekeepers for a blog tour is an oxymoron.

So were going to organize our own blook tour. More information about that in an upcoming post but authors interested in coming on the tour and bloggers interested in hosting stops can write to [email protected] and we’ll be sure to get back to you pretty soon with more details.

Isn’t there lots of crap out there?  When the publishers are dethroned as gatekeepers, who will separate the good stuff from the bad?  Gatekeeping won’t go away; it’ll just be democratized.  You and I will still choose our books based on the recommendations of both bloggers and traditional reviewers whose tastes are like ours.  Online groups of people with similar interests will continue to share recommendations among members.  Because most books will be available online, it will be easy to try before buying even for those who want a physical book.

There will still be hits and flops but there will also be room for many more niche successes. There are an infinite variety of tastes which require the potential for a near infinite set of gates.  That’s what the Internet is all about.  “Good” or “bad” book or song or idea is a function of what we like; these are not absolutes. The Internet allows us to break our dependence on the editorial judgment of a relatively few traditional publishers and to choose who our gatekeepers should be.

This is not a rant born of rejection.  I chose to self-publish for reasons I blogged here and podcast here.  I don’t know how hard it would have been to find a traditional publisher for my novel because I didn’t try.  The same logic that led me start an “Internet” phone company years ago makes me want to lead with an Internet edition of my book, a blook tour, and an Internet-based marketing campaign.  The Internet gives us the potential to change almost anything – and it’s a lot of fun to try.