Identifying and developing new talent is critical to a growing an IP business. The publishing industry entrusts this important function to their editors.
Editors are the engines of the industry. Growth depends on them. They are charged with making the right bets on the right authors; they function as a funnel for new talent. It has been one of the core strengths of the publishing industry for a long time—the curation of quality content.
Then, everything changed. Digital distribution democratized the process, and we found out that working with a publisher wasn’t the only way to get to market. The channels were now open. The noise level got loud. And worse yet, some of the new products were good.
Under these new conditions, you’d think that curation would be even more important now, right?
Instead, we see even more pressure on today’s editors. They are armed with same experience and intuition they always had, but the battlefield has changed significantly. The result is that they tend to get very conservative in their decisions. They lean closer to their tried-and-true Tentpole Tendency, which relies on predictable performance from established talent. They take fewer chances on new authors. This puts the whole system at risk. No new talent, no new growth.
Publishers still position themselves as the tastemakers, but they are not. Readers are. Empowered by the Web, readers got more powerful. They started to look to one another for recommendations—they didn’t rely exclusively on “experts” anymore.
This should present an opportunity, but publishers lack a direct connection to readers. They ceded that to retailers years ago. So they are left making guesses at pleasing the real tastemakers. And they are wrong—a lot.
Editors can’t up their hit rate, because they don’t have a relationship with their customers. They don’t even have access to them, or much hope of ever getting their attention. All they have are their hunches, which—as the market churns—are getting less predictive, not more.
As an author, you don’t need to take this anymore. You don’t need a Gatekeeper, especially one who’s largely guessing. You need a platform. And there are tons out there that have sprung up to fill this value gap.
It’s still your responsibility to produce Good Content—and I recommend that you, at the very least, pay for a good editor and a good cover designer. Producing a good book is hard work. But you don’t need industry validation. Only one thing matters when you’re producing a book—that your audience likes it. If your audience likes it, then it’s valuable. Period. You don’t need it to be validated by a Gatekeeper.
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For more, listen to The Gatekeeper is Guessing (podcast version):
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The text of this article was originally published on Libboo.com. For a collection of my articles on Libboo.com, please see: http://bit.ly/libboo-boezi.