The Problem With Publishing Today Is All The Damned Content

For those of you old enough (or lucky enough) to have seen the 1987 movie, The Lost Boys, you may recognize this line: “That’s the problem with Santa Carla. All the damned vampires.” That just about sums up the problem with the publishing industry. Just substitute publishing for Santa Carla and content for vampires. 

Why is content a problem? Where do I start? Well, lets start by defining content, which in this case means information, generally in written form, for which there is an audience. Content can be free or paid; it can be valuable or worthless; but most importantly, it takes time to consume it, and time has a value all its own—time is money, after all. People consuming content are trading their valuable time and hopefully gaining something from the experience, entertainment and knowledge being the primary two benefits.

With the advent of self-publishing, the market was flooded with books—fiction, non-fiction, well-written, poorly written—and for the first couple of years, this was a real boon for readers and authors alike. The readers got to see some really great authors that the “gatekeeper” publishers would have otherwise ignored, and the authors got to get their work out into the market, and make money from it. That’s the point, after all.

But all that content suddenly appearing in the book market changed the dynamics of the market itself. With the increase in competition for readers’ attention, as well as their dollars, the price of content began to come down. It isn’t quite free yet, but it is approaching free as time goes on. I have been told more times than I can count that there is downward pressure on the price of ebooks in a self-publishing market. But instead of this pressure coming from Amazon, as was the common hypothesis, I’m convinced it came from market forces bigger than even Amazon itself.

Then came the spammers. It wasn’t so very long ago when Amazon had problems with bogus books, stolen books, poorly formatted public domain books, and who knows what else entering the market. Once people started noticing this problem, Amazon eventually took action to reduce if not remove spam content. Today, it is still possible to find spam-like content, but for the most part, most of the books I run across were actually written by someone, and are not stolen books or computer-generated gibberish. But the low quality of the spam—and much of the “real” stuff, too, for that matter—has created what they call in the automobile industry the “lemon effect.” A lemon car is one that just won’t work right. Some cars, even though they are identical in every way to the other cars that are the same make and model, break down or stop working much too early in the life of the car. There are even “lemon laws” that allow consumers to return lemons to the dealer when it becomes clear that they don’t work. Lemons make consumers nervous about buying cars, and lemon books—which in this case I mean bad content, not faulty software—make readers nervous about buying something practically sight unseen.

Now, it used to be that in order to avoid lemon content and find a book best suited to the reader, there were well-known, independent reviewers who gave opinions about the book, which readers used to make selections. With the flood of content at the beginning of the self-publishing revolution, it started to become more and more difficult for independent reviewers to review everything, or even nearly everything. Enter the citizen reviewer. These reviewers had been around since at least the advent of the world wide web, and were very useful for identifying bad products, services, or other consumables. Citizen reviewers had been reviewing books online from the beginning of online bookstores. But when they really came into their own was when the self-published books began hitting the market. This is because these reviews were perhaps the only reviews a book might get. Recommendation algorithms, like those at Amazon, use those reviews as a guide to what to promote. And if you weren’t being promoted by the retailer (again, Amazon), you weren’t being seen. So getting those citizen reviews became essential.

However, there is a problem with getting reviews, whether from well-known reviewers with an audience or the citizen reviews that I have referred to. It takes time to read a book (for some, a few hours, for others, a few weeks), and then it can take a couple of hours for a reviewer to craft a well-written review. That means, in the case of a very fast reader, it can take as much or more time to write the review as it did to read the book. If there was an infinite amount of time in the day, the enormous—and growing—number of books that could be reviewed would be reviewed. But since time flies, so do the opportunities to review books. Even reviewers have to sleep once in a while.

Since it is so cumbersome for a reviewer to review as many books as there are in the market, many books go unreviewed. But remember, the recommendation algorithms at Amazon and other retailers depend on those reviews. So where is an author/publisher/self-publisher supposed to get reviews, when even the well-known reviewers are backed up beyond belief. The answer is simple: Sock puppets!

I’ve already covered the subject of Sockpuppetry in detail, so I won’t repeat that here. What I will say is that sockpuppetry has created a lemon effect on the reviews that were meant to warn people away from the lemons in the first place. Talk about irony!

The enormous influx of content has overwhelmed the system. Even though there is enough demand for content out there for people to make money, the book market isn’t the Field of Dreams. If you build it, they will almost certainly not come, unless you or someone else tells them about it. Word of mouth is still the most powerful selling tool out there, but the number of books to talk about is increasing faster than the mouths can keep up. The well-known, independent reviewers can’t review everything—when contacted, most of them have told me that they receive hundreds of requests for reviews each day, and there’s no way for them to keep up. And even if you can get a citizen reviewer to review your book, nobody listens to them anymore because they are more likely to be sockpuppets than actual people—or, I suppose, if they are real people, then their reviews are canned. The system is broken.

When I say, the system is broken, I mean Amazon is broken, and Amazon broke everything else along the way. It has been clear from the beginning of the self-publishing revolution that Amazon was out to put everyone else in the publishing industry out of business. They got Borders bookstores to fold already, and they caused the agency price-fixing conspiracy to happen as a direct result of their predatory tactics. But what is becoming clear is, Amazon’s system is broken too. Sockpuppetry is a result of authors taking advantage of a gaping hole in the integrity of the review system at Amazon. I’m not defending the sock puppeters, but at the time this started, it was game the system or be left behind. Now that the sock puppet scandal has come out, Amazon is moving to fix that part of the system, but they haven’t created something to replace it with.

And, quite frankly, it is Amazon’s mess to fix.