“Gatekeeping” as a term for filtering out literary wheat from chaff is new to me, and a little troubling. It sounds more like a fashion of moral do-gooding than gut literary criticism. That eerie side of it would, I hope, be prevented by a pachinko of altruistic critics, namely, ordinary readers.

That being said, I was interested in Indie Reader until I saw the price. It’s like buying space in someone’s catalog, or any marketing expenditure. Having self-published God’s Thunderbolt: The Vigilantes of Montana, when it comes to spending the money the book makes for me, I use the business side of my writer’s brain with another question. Is this listing the most bang for the buck? I’ll wait and see.

“One must draw the line somewhere, and I’m drawing it there. I’ve tried, honest, but I’ve yet to encounter a self-published book that held my interest more than it loudly broadcasted its failings.”

I could send him one or two books that might change his mind, but Mark’s is the prevailing view.

In my experience, there is very little awareness of self-publishing as a phenomenon outside of the publishing industry (and I include authors and aspiring authors in that industry). The average reader doesn’t even know self-publishing exists. It’s only when you explain what it is, and why someone might choose this path (“They couldn’t find a publisher who wanted their book”) that they hesitate and start wondering about quality. Confronted with a self-published book on Amazon, or on the shelf in a bookstore, most readers would be hard pressed to tell the difference between it and a traditionally published book. One they get the book in their hands, however, it’s usually clearer. Poor or non-existent editing is the giveaway, if shitty cover design and amateurish layout weren’t enough. For me, those are the fundamental problems with most self-published books: they haven’t been through the editorial process, and they haven’t been professionally designed. (I think we often forget how many readers appreciate the book as beautiful object.)

So if someone wants to provide a real service to self-published authors, and make a pretty penny in the process, those are the services they should be offering for an affordable price: editorial assistance and design. Not “promotion” (whatever that means), and certainly not just focusing on those books that already satisfy the minimal requirement of not insulting the reader with their sloppiness. The sloppiness is the problem: that’s what needs to be fixed! Fixing it at a reasonable price would be a boon to the industry. Making self-publishing “cool” is a secondary goal, and I suspect that producing better books is a necessary step in that direction.

It remains to be seen if IndieReader is going to inspire the same kind of confidence in anyone. The parallels with independent film and punk rock don’t ring true for me. They might if self-publishing were full of challenging, experimental, non-commercial books breaking new artistic ground; books that were being resisted by risk-averse mainstream publishers who were too conservative or too stupid to see a new kind of literature blossoming around them. But is self-publishing really like that? Honestly? In some cases it is. But the majority of self-published books were aiming squarely for mainstream commercial success and just didn’t make the cut. Is paying $149 to a website going to change anything for that kind of book? Is it even going to change anything for the experimental book? I think IndieReader needs to be a lot clearer on precisely what you’re getting for your money.

I like the idea of trying to make self-publishing “cool”; make it less about vanity and rejection, and more about freedom, creativity and choice; make it anti-corporate, grass-roots, more ‘real’; pitch it to readers as a way of sidestepping the corporate filter and connecting directly with writers. But I don’t see how IndieReader will achieve that. On the face of it, they sound like just another publisher: they vet your work according to some undisclosed standard, and they might choose to take it on and promote it. The only difference is you pay them to. How is this cool?