Alternate publishing and the gatekeeper problem

[nancylebov]

From haikujaguar:

This is not to say that marketable work by the industry's standards can't also be brilliant. But the publishing industry is not a meritocracy. By its nature, art is individual. A decade ago, what the mass majority of readers could read at all was selected by a very small number of people. If their tastes didn't match up with the tastes of the reader... then three people lost out: publisher (who made no money), reader (who had to settle for something they didn't care for or not read at all)... and writer (who wasn't bought). It also means there's a "house style" throughout the entire industry, one so pervasive most of us don't even realize that we're all writing books with similar structures because those are the books that sell to generations of readers who have been taught this is what "good books" look like.

But good stories come in more forms than the ones we're entrained to accept as "well-written." Every currently acceptable style was once avante garde. The novel itself is only a few centuries old. A lot of the artificial distinctions created by a paper society no longer need apply: novellas aren't "bad" art because they've been considered unsellable by our existing business model. Books don't have to be written in trilogies or issued in chunks. "It's the way we've always done it" is not a valid argument unless the alternatives are unworkable... and I should know. I'm a pretty old-fashioned sort and I get that argument all the time.

And I agree with every word-- I'm especially fond of the point that everything we read now was avante-garde (or at least an experiment that worked) at some time.

I'm fascinated by the way fanfic writers and readers have developed a complex system of indexing and recommendation from the bottom up. I was tempted to start this post by saying that no one reads the slushpile for fun, but fanfic readers do, or at least they read it for free.

The limitation I can see is that, as far as I can tell, it's optimized for finding the fiction which scratches itches which the readers already know they have.

There's no system yet for finding stories that readers don't know yet that they want, and those are the stories haikujaguar is especially advocating for.

I'm not sure what such a system would look like-- it isn't likely to be automated, and I don't think it can be unless we've at least got AI which can understand natural language and human beings very well. I don't think we're very close to AI at that level.

It would probably be possible to have automated systems to identify the worst conventional prose, but they'd write off James Joyce and not be able to recognize fiction written in dialects-- and dialects are definitely part of the range I hope would be tremendously expanded by decentralized publishing. In any case, this is just snipping off one type of badness. It couldn't begin to recognize the smoothly written story which just doesn't quite satisfy, or is a good enough example of its type but nothing special.

I can't imagine a program (at anything near the current level of knowledge) which can manage one of the hard problems-- identifying fiction which is likely to induce a trance, even for the general public, let alone optimizing trance induction for individual readers. [1]

And trance induction is just the beginning-- there's plenty more to stories that people really love.

Amazon's and pandora's recommendation systems have limits-- I've heard that amazon's is really uninspired for sf [1], and pandora's isn't much good if you're familiar with a musical field.

OK, if it can't be automated, how can people do it?

[1]We don't necessarily want those programs.....if they can identify trance-induction, they can probably produce it, too. I recommend Leiber's The Silver Eggheads, a very funny sf satire about the future of publishing. The artificially generated fiction is read once and forgotten immediately, and called wordwooze. Only robots write their own fiction.

[2]I don't use amazon recommendations for fiction much, but I've found they're very good for books on T'ai Chi and Feldenkrais.

Comments

[andrewducker]

Amazon's recommendation is very simple - and perfect for finding the "best items in this niche", but not much use for finding anything else.

[sodyera.livejournal.com]

Searching for publication, this is a particularly noisome issue. Where do I get in? How do I get read by more than "my" cadre? I know I can't market or promote for excrement or I'd just put my manuscript on Amazon. Publishers used to be THE gateway to resolve the traffic issue, but not any more. Now the gateway is swamped and nobody can get in. Plus the gatekeepers still have to make money. This is a complaint btw; I have no solutions.

[madfilkentist]

Recommendations from people you trust are still the best way to learn about things you'd like (of all kinds). Computer technology has widened the opportunities for doing that, even if it's widened the opportunities for astroturf at the same time.

Be cautious with Amazon; they're known to delete unfavorable reviews. In any case, it's not that people recommend something, but why they recommend it, and whether that reason is one you care about.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Agreed on that last. It's especially interesting with the self-help and exercise books-- has a recommender actually tried what was in the book, for how long, and what results did they get?

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I think you raise a good question about how you find your audience. I think it relates to the question, how does one do marketing that attracts, rather than alienates, people? I have no answers to that: we are so inundated all the time by people and organizations asking for our attention that sometimes it's hard even to pay attention to the ones we know we like, let alone new things that we might like if we gave them a chance. To join the masses begging for the public's attention... a daunting prospect.

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

yes, on all counts. A day suddenly came, maybe 8 years ago, when I didn't want anything at Barnes and Noble. I've heard this can happen with alcohol as well, you just suddenly reject it. I looked around all the hopeful paperback covers and their neatly manicured graphic design and I knew that there was nothing inside that would interest me in current fiction. I was pretty sure I knew what every single story was about - and if there was a book on offer of which that wasn't true, it wasn't worth the pain to me to go and seek it out.

That sounds pretty dismissive, maybe ignorant and certainly arrogant. Sorry. But I'm just turned off by current publishing. And movies are worse, I guess because they're more expensive.

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

...one thing about Pandora: it's very culturally located. As a Brit I find its genre categories often just weird, while my Brazilian friends dislike being classed with Salsa and Merengue.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

There's no system yet for finding stories that readers don't know yet that they want, and those are the stories haikujaguar is especially advocating for.

That's not a problem distinctive to authors or publishers. Creating markets for products that people don't know they want is one of the major economic functions of entrepreneurs generally. And given the nature of entrepreneurship, I would suggest that it can never be automated. Anything that can be done automatically will become part of the economic routine that creates market equilibrium; doing something innovative is part of the "creative destruction" that Schumpeter wrote about, and requires someone to spot a chance to create a new equilibrium and profit from the change of state.

[solri.livejournal.com]

I find the fantasy trilogy convention particularly amusing because of its origin: Tolkien's publisher didn't want to print The Lord of the Rings as one volume because paper was expensive after WWII.

[darius.livejournal.com]

I came across one awesome unpublishable story from seeing the author's Tolkien essays recommended by one LJ-friend, liking them, friending the author's journal, and eventually getting around to checking out her fanfiction. That'd generalize to some other authors, though blogging and fiction are of course different.

If you care to recommend books on t'ai chi or Feldenkrais, I'd be interested. I bounced off _Awareness Through Movement_ -- I see Amazon gives a higher rating to a book by Frank Wildman.

[darius.livejournal.com]

(This is a bit separate from your point about the fanfic system because I don't especially read fanfic in general.)

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

My two favorite T'ai Chi books are Stalking Yang Lu Chan by Robin Lipton (about the experience of learning and teaching T'ai Chi) and T'ai Chi as a Path of Wisdom by Linda Myoki Lehrhaupt (a meticulous description of things worth paying attention to in T'ai Chi, like exactly how to distribute your weight on your feet).

If you want a beginner's book, Master Lam's Step-by-Step T'ai ChiThe Way of Energy (a introduction to standing meditation) has been extremely valuable to me. The T'ai Chi book somehow inspired me to be more ambitious about getting good at T'ai Chi.

The Wildman book looks very promising, but I haven't tried it. Mindful Sponteneity by Ruthi Alon is excellent. Step into Life by Anat Baniel has effective efficient exercises (maybe the best I've seen), but I get spooked (neurotic stuff I'm working on) by the direct promise of more vitality. Saner people would probably benefit a lot from the book.

The Wildman reviews mention Somatics by Hanna, which has a useful set of exercises (old school with 30 reps) and Relaxercise by David Zemach-bersi, Kaethe Zemach-Bersin, Mark Reese-- which is notable for having 6 reviewers, all of whom have actually used the book and liked it, and for only asking for 8 reps.