Originally it was going to be “over the last twenty years” but I decided to be more flexible.
A lot of discussions about how society has changed or how the world is different always circle around to smartphones, social media, “no one talks to each other in person, they’re on their phones always” and the like.
Outside of those topics, what else has changed, by your perception?
Oh I don’t disagree with you on that.
However, because the barrier to entry is gone, and even financially there’s no barrier to getting your work out there, even rejection isn’t enough to curtail the slop.
First “self-published” novel got 1 review that literally called it “an atrocity worthy of the Nuremburg trials”? Who cares. Publish that sequel…and the sequel after that. There’s literally no incentive to get better and no dis-incentive to prevent it no matter how crap the work might be.
The only real incentive anymore to stop publishing your glorious 12-volumes-and-counting epic story about a space wizard that has never actually sold a single copy is literally self-shame, which, in art circles, is not a common commodity.
So regardless of whether or not they are being read, or purchased, they’re still just taking up more and more space. Adding more and more static to the crap that the future is going to have to sift through.
To me, anyway, it has less to do with gate-keeping and more to do with curation.
Curation is more than possible no matter what volume of titles there are. Review sites, recommendations, etc. are good places to start. I would rather spend 10 minutes for every book I read verifying that other people enjoyed it than one single book anywhere be judged unfairly just because the author is bad at dealing with publishers, or the book contains content that publishers would see as obscene or offensive, and is thus cut off from ever being read by a stranger.
Books that very few people enjoy are also going to be a lot rarer (even in digital copies) than books that many people enjoy. The creme of the crop is always going to be made pretty obvious.
I admire your optimism about cream rising to the top. But I just can’t share it.
The average person isn’t going to spend an hour digging through a literal trash-heap on Amazon in order to find something worth their time. They’ll give up after five minutes of reading terrible review after terrible review and then go find something else to do with their time.
And thus the collective intelligence of humanity drops; not because they’re actually reading all of this white noise of self-published crap. But because they’re not reading at all because of the effort it takes to weed through it at the book store (digital or otherwise).
The best example I can give is how “Oprah’s Book Club” (am I giving away how damn old I am yet?) got people reading. They read because they didn’t have to go and find this stuff themselves. Someone curated it for them, told them “Hey…this is good”.
If the average reader didn’t have Oprah and had to dig through five thousand Amazon self-published “suggestions” before stumbling onto Toni Morrison or Push by Sapphire, they’re quickly go doom scroll Facebook instead.
Like I said, I admire your optimism and a part of me wishes I could share it. But the idea that the lack of any accountability for self-“published” drivel completely muddies any real “discover-ability” of the actual good stuff is a hill that my elitist ass will happily die on.
I know this will sound really condescending, but you can sort entries by highest ratings on any good website. You do not actually have to browse through every single book ever made.
No worries. I freely admit that my entire opinion on the subject of self-publishing is elitist and condescending as all hell. So I can put on my big-boy pants and take a bit of my own medicine back. No worries.
But no, I didn’t take your response as condescending. You’re right that a person can sort and filter. But a filter should almost be an option, not a necessity. I’ll happily sort by genre, or page count, or yes…even ratings, to find something interesting to me.
But I shouldn’t have to have a button that says “sort out any crap that hasn’t even gone through a cursory elementary school grammar course”. There’s a line in the sand of what should and shouldn’t be acceptable in any business environment that nominally wants people to spend money with them, and “making my customers weed out unprofessional garbage” should (IMO) be that line. Amazon, Kobo, or wherever, should at the bare minimum be telling people front and centre, “this is the minimum level of quality you can expect…feel free to sort however you like, but we at least guarantee that every book will meet a certain level of literacy.”
We seem to be operating on very different frameworks of thought. I’ve made my case to you in its entirety and you are not satisfied with it, there aren’t any more details I can include that you might be missing, so I think that’s where this discussion ends. We simply have different values, and I’m ill-equipped with hard evidence to attempt to change yours. In any case, thank you for being so polite while we argued this subject. It’s nice to see other people trying to start a tradition of not blowing up at each other on these new social sites, unlike Reddit. I hope the next book you read is immensely satisfying.