By Michelle Brower
My post last week and some recent publishing pal conversations have gotten me thinking about gatekeepers and gatekeeping in general- hence the Monty Python reference. I've given everyone a pretty accurate (and hopefully not too depressing) picture of what my submission inbox looks like, and what it takes to go through it (practical note- I am closed to queries until April 1st since it's going to take some serious ditch digging to get through this batch). But I've never been that comfortable thinking of myself as a gatekeeper of traditional publishing. That implies that I mostly want to keep people out, not let them in. And many people that I have sent packing (hopefully with more kindness than the French) have gone on to great success with other agents & publishers and even publishing on their own.
So what does it mean to be a gatekeeper in an age of easy publishing? I like to think that what I do is cultivate long term relationships with editors where my taste means something- that if I say I like a novel, they will trust that there is something accomplished and compelling about it. I honestly don't know how poor writing can sell- we are readers, after all, and we are all experts in that way- but it often does, and it often sells well. I have to admit I had a huge VC Andrews fascination as a teenager (eew, right?), and I recently picked up a re-packaged copy of Flowers in the Attic and gah! The writing was atrocious! But somehow it didn't matter. People were really happy to read this. But, would it have been so hard to have, you know, also made it good??
I'm not a gatekeeper to keep people out, but I will be the first to admit that my own personal taste has a huge, huge part in who gets through the portcullis (really, this whole post was to get a legitimate excuse to use that word). And, to be really frank, most of the people in publishing are ladies of a certain education level that live on a coast. I am certain that there are things we are just missing out on because we just have too uniform a background. That's the cool thing about e-publishing, I think; there's a chance to actually go out and find your market (your market may only want to pay 99 cents, but that is still totally a market). But in a chorus of a thousand voices, how do you make yourself stand out? Does that make gatekeepers even more valuable as a way of denoting quality over quantity? (Seriously guys, these are actual questions, I would love to hear your thoughts. Because if we know anything about publishing, it's that we've got NO CLUE why certain strategies work for certain books and not others).
And lastly, a parting thought: Getting published is not an unalienable right. Nor is it a privilege. It's a business (while never straying far from being an art). So let's figure out how to make some money together (and here I fan myself with a wad of cash while wearing shutter shades and shouting at the interns to dance, dance!).
