How often have you wished for publishers to issue stories with more quality? Of course when we talk about quality this is inevitably subjective, so in the end what it comes down to is wanting more stories we like. Unfortunately, not all of us are editors, nor could we be. Editing is difficult, expensive and necessarily specialized work… or is it?
There’s something to be said for job specialisation: in many respects it has been the key factor in the increase of labour output, or certainly one of them. To people like Heinlein, who say specialisation is for insects, I reply that it’s no coincidence insects are such incredibly successful organisms. Nonetheless, there are many things that once upon a time required specialised knowledge, and which have become commonplace: reading and writing are the obvious examples. So is there a chance that publishing fiction could be one of those cases too?
This is one of those questions that requires an experimental answer. No deductions from first principles here. Fortunately, the attempt has been done, so it’s possible to give a reasonably reality-grounded answer, and the answer is yes, with reservations.
The experiment involved setting up a website and an e-mail address to receive submissions, as well as a request for stories under specific terms. Not incredibly favourable commercial terms, but as it happens sufficiently favourable to obtain more than enough stories of good quality. Of course, it’s in the nature of publishing–and that’s what this was, even if unorthodox–that one must be able to advance the money. It’s therefore not exactly a risk-free venture.
Aside from the interesting verification of the claim that it is possible–though commercially difficult, perhaps not yet viable–to become a publisher by advancing some money, using print on demand and so on, the experiment had also another object, which is rather interesting in itself:
Even if you don’t like all the stories in Thoughtcrime Experiments, I hope you’ll agree that they’re of similar quality to the stories you see in big-name print magazines. The “experiment” behind Thoughtcrime Experiments was to verify the existence of such stories floating around in editors’ slush piles. To get a firsthand look it was necessary to become editors.
It turns out that indeed there is an oversupply of stories, not only with respect to readers, but also with respect to editors.
It’s well known that there’s an oversupply of stories relative to readers. That’s why rates are so low. Our experiment shows that there’s an oversupply of stories relative to editors. By picking up this anthology you’ve done what you can to change the balance of readers to stories. I wrote this appendix to show that you’ve also got the power to change the balance of editors to stories.
Of course something being possible doesn’t make it necessarily easy. In this case, I suspect the experience takes enough money and time that it won’t be very widely replicated, for now. It makes one think though: if indeed stories are oversupplied with respect to readers, how come people keep, in one way or another, paying for them? The argument that people pay for consistently good stories isn’t sufficient, since the experiment shows–to the extent this sample size can–that consistently good stories are oversupplied as well.
Perhaps the essential reason is readers do not have the energy to search for the consistently good stories. This requires, of necessity, an editor role. An editor role must invest time and money in separating good from bad stories, but, more to the point, because an editor role must invest time and money, it won’t be possible to publish all the good stories. A form of artificial scarcity–beyond the copyright question itself–must be created in order to support the infrastructure of publishing and editing.
So this is yet another way in which the commodity form and its imperatives shape our life, in this case our culture, by reducing the potential amount of value. Nothing new, I suppose, but an interesting application of the principle.
Tags: anthology, experiment, fantasy, fiction, literature, pod, print on demand, publishing, science fiction, sf
