Who Validates the Validators?

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the idea of validation. Namely, who decides if a writer’s work is good? Is it the writer only? The agent who represents it? The publisher who accepts it? The booksellers who select and sell it? The readers who buy it? All these people have a say in the traditional world of publishing. But their weight is not equally distributed, and that imbalance is part of what’s driving the boom in indie publishing.

There’s a lot of talk among indie writers on the interwebs about validation. Some people who don’t like indie publishing feel that the lack of validation is a major problem with the model. Self-published stuff is crap, they say. People can put up anything they want! There’s no control! Without a gatekeeper, who can tell what’s good and bad?

To which my rejoinder is: how about you decide what’s good and bad for you? Isn’t that ultimately what happens anyway?

Think about it. Even for traditionally published books (or perhaps “corporate published” is more accurate, since there have been indie publishers as long as there’s been print), there is no guarantee of quality. I’ve read fantastic books from the Big 6. I’ve read terrible books from the Big 6. I’ve read great stories that nevertheless suffered from a few typos. And I’ve read disappointing stories by authors I otherwise love and admire. Even if the “gatekeepers” do their job perfectly (an impossible standard), there is still room for the reader to be unhappy with the product.

Now I understand the argument is rarely this clear-cut. The defenders of corporate publishing don’t say that no bad books get published by the Big 6. They say that your chances of running into crap are just a lot higher if you shop indie. That may have been true at one point, although I kind of doubt it. I’ve worked at bookstores that stock all kinds of books (from major publishers, small presses, and indie publishers). The source was never the sole indicator of quality. Anyone can judge the quality of a physical book before they buy it. Flip through it. Read the back. Skim a few pages. If it’s straight-up crap, you’ll know. And you won’t buy it.

With ebooks, the challenge is slightly different, since you can’t physically leaf through the whole book before buying. But you can usually see a sample chapter. You can read the synopsis and the back “cover”. You can check out the blurbs. And you can of course look at the reviews. So I don’t feel that the risk of slush is a particularly threatening one. Bad books will garner bad reviews. Poor formatting will be evident in the sample, warning you not to buy. And the system of reader recommendations and sales matching will become more robust as the number of ebooks grows, thus providing richer metadata for all those systems to draw from.

Just as people found corporate-pubbed authors they liked, so too they will find them among indie-pubbed authors. And considering that many authors are now publishing under both models, this will probably become easier than ever. We readers will be our own validators. And really, isn’t that how it should be?

But even if the quality of any individual book is something that readers can judge for themselves, indie publishing offers one more thing that corporate publishers don’t — the potential to open the submissions process to a whole new class of validators. There are fewer barriers between the author and the reader...far fewer gatekeepers with veto power. This aspect of indie publishing is spun as a negative by some. Without gatekeepers, who will protect the reader?

The corporate model is nothing but gatekeepers, and it’s unclear exactly who they are protecting from whom. Agents, editors, publishers, marketing teams, the financial department…all these people can shut down a book’s publication for reasons that may or may not have anything to do with the book’s quality. Perhaps one editor doesn’t like the story. Maybe a book with a similar plot has already been accepted, and the publisher doesn’t want to cannibalize sales. Maybe budget cuts mean that some books just won’t get published in the foreseeable future. Readers don’t even get a chance to read those ill-starred books. Unless the author chooses to publish it himself.

The immense appeal of indie epublishing is that it sidesteps the corporate model. Someone writes a book. He publishes it, and you can buy it. Or not. It’s up to you. The reader takes control over what he chooses to buy, according to the criteria that matter to him. In terms of validation, that’s the advantage of indie publishing. The readers are the validators. So instead of trying to please the army of gatekeepers whose goals may be only tangentially related to the writer’s own, writers can focus on the one group that matters, their readers.