On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 9:02 AM, Jonathan Sherwood <
[email protected]> wrote:
> In the past, I would have argued alongside Rob, saying that readers depend
> on editors to select only what's worth reading, but there are enough
> examples of authors going straight to the audience and the audience
> responding well that I think it's fair to say that there may be another
> model rising.
Rob is stuck in the past on this one, I'm afraid.
The deeper point -- that people rely on others for filtering and
recommendation -- is very valid, but editors and publishers are simply one
form of that.
And arguably not the dominant form. We all still get lots of recommendations
for things from friends, co-workers, the coffee shop manager, and so on.
That's been the dominant form of quality-filtering throughout human history,
and I don't really think that's changed in the advertising age. Having a
nice binding and pretty cover made us more likely to pay $15 for a book than
a coil-bound 8.5x11 MS, for sure, but how much that has to do with filtering
for quality and how much to do with packaging -- and the extent to which we
are aware of the latter, which is really very great, IMO -- is very much
open for debate.
In any case, we have two phenomena going on in parallel: One is that the
massive net-driven disintermediation that I'm always skeptical about that
that is nevertheless really happening drives a return to word-of-mouth
("WOM" as the marketeers say) as the primary means of judging quality. The
other is that new mechanisms (I prefer that to "paradigm", at least for the
present) for communicating the quality of an artifact are developing,
rapidly, and rapidly gaining traction.
>
> We all know that editors are subjective, and they're much more likely to
> buy a story from an author with a good track record than buy the exact same
> story from an author with none. The editor is depending on the audience to
> do some selecting for them. There are clearly examples of authors who have
> podcasted their novels, gotten a considerable following, and attracted the
> attention of editors who would have otherwise ignored them.
>
>
You seem to be talking half in the present and half historically. I.e., not
sure if this is what you meant, but editors and publishers have ALWAYS
relied on market feedback to drive their decisions. Even in the worst
nightmare scenarios of marketeers putting ideas into our heads about what we
want/like/need/love, hardly anybody thought they would be creating those
wants/likes/needs/loves out of whole cloth. People who understood persuasion
usually assumed that the pitch would be based on something that was already
there. (Occasionally I seem to recall encountering the idea that marketers
and advertisers just put ideas into our heads with no participation on our
part, but that's not really a very interesting notion without some really
persuasive argument. But that's also one of the more interesting themes
running through Dick's work, this idea that not only reality itself, but our
experience of reality, is suspect. Why that's interesting to me is that it
pulls the discourse back around to us messing with our own heads, rather
than people or things stuffing things into our head. We get more agency in
the matter, I guess is what it means to me.)
> The way it works right now is that we submit to an editor on the hopes that
> the editor believes there is a market potential for our work. But it makes
> perfect sense to provide an editor with actual proof that your work is
> marketable. More and more these days, that's possible to do.
>
>
Not much to add here. It does make sense. Some editors are certainly
reluctant to buy something that's already been out there, but those editors
aren't compiling reprint anthologies, for example. How is a
previously-self-published book ultimately different from a
previously-publisher-published short story that shows up in a reprint
anthology?
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