Publish and be damned

Long long time ago when I was a member of the Board of Governors of a nearby primary school, the head teacher commented on a story in the local press that she didn't like. I don't recall the details.

"Who gets to decide what goes in the newspapers?" She asked.

It was a rhetorical question. Clearly she was bemoaning the fact that she, along with the vast majority of people, had no say in what should be published.

As a magazine journalist at the time, I kept my counsel. I was one of those who did have a say, albeit in what did and didn't into a specialist publication that numbered its readers in the tens of thousands, rather than the millions of readers, at the time, of some newspapers.

The newspaper under discussion at the school was probably the Croydon Advertiser, a local institution founded in 1869. In its heyday, the Advertiser boasted a weekly circulation of some 70,000. You can still buy copies and add to the current readership of a mere 1,000 die-hard (and possibly die-soonish) readers.

Since the rise of the Internet and what we now call 'social media,' the publishing landscape has all changed. Instead of the tightly-controlled access to editorial decision-making that the head teacher complained about, we have the anarchic free-for-all that we all like to deride... when it goes against us.

There was a reason why journalist jealously guarded our editorial freedoms. Not just because they were ours to guard, but because it helped to provide a quality product to our readers. When a press release from Hugh Jekzaggeration and Partners Public Relations landed on my desk in the 90s, it was my decision whether the puff package stayed on the desk, or was swept into the bin, along with dozens of other pointless press releases.

"Revolutionary, epoch-making, long-awaited, ground-breaking, new..." I read aloud in a bored voice.

"What is it? Another 'lap-top' computer that weighs a ton?" asked the features editor.

"If there's so many of them, we should run a special supplement..." chipped in the advertising manager.

I could tell there was nothing interesting going on, as the whole office seemed to want to join in the discussion.

"No," I answered. "Some new 'Artificial Intelligence' software product, whatever that means.

"Software..." said the ad manager, with a whine of disgust. "Waste of time. We did that last month and only had half a dozen takers." By which he meant advertisers. The supplement in question barely broke even on ad sales over print production costs.

This was the 1990s and, though we enjoyed considerable support from advertising revenues, our specialist trade-technical publication had to be very careful to cost out any additional pagination.

The ad manager didn't bother to ask what was meant by artificial intelligence. If it didn't contribute any advertising income to his bonus calculation, he wasn't interested.

The features editor told me about a conversation he'd had with a tech freelancer who had been speaking to some Cambridge research outfit that had come up with an AI that could beat a chess champion. Nothing newsworthy in that, so I handed the release over to the features editor to see if he could make something of it. For my own part, I figured if the university innovation campuses were still playing with AI, there had to be at least two or three years before any useful product came of it. History has, of course, demonstrated that it took a lot longer than that.

This is how it used to work. There was a curatorial process involved with deciding what new information should be included in any newspaper or, as in our case, trade/tech magazine. Most of the promotion for AI now comes from people like we Vocal creators complaining how AI is going to take away lots of jobs and steal all of our IP rights. All OpenAI had to do to get some publicity was to launch a free version of ChatGPT and post a few comments in the Twittersphere. Immediatedly, millions of people around the world were either using it and/or complaining about it. Either way AI gets more publicity. And so it continues.

Why is this relevant to those of us in the business (mostly hobby in my case) of writing books, short stories, poems and suchlike creative attempts to get published and be read?

The rules of curation have changed. Those who used to control the means of publication now have to pander to social media whim rather than think about what the reader and buyer of books and magazines wants. Publishing is in a state of flux. We have online publishers such as Vocal Media who encourage a community of creators to support each other's work. Valuable though that is, it does nothing to help create a wider audience.

On the other hand, the likes of Amazon have created a means for authors to publish their own works in book and e-book formats and enjoy free access to Amazon buyers. Self-publishing is now a thing you can do without the stigma of going the shabby vanity press route.

Never forget, however, that book publishers still control book publishing. They still curate their own works according to their own rules and tastes. If you want to get 'respectably' published, it's no good just writing a book. You have to have an existing social media following. You have to have a presence, an authorly persona, as defined by the curators of authorly personas: the publishers.

Publish and be damned is a phrase often attributed to the Duke of Wellington. When a former mistress threatened to include details of their affair in her memoirs in a blackmailing attempt, the Duke is reputed to have told her "Publish and be damned."

Have you ever wondered why Joanne Rowling became J.K. Rowling for the first Harry Potter book? She had no middle name beginning with K or any other letter of the alphabet. The official story is that the publisher Bloomsbury was concerned that boys wouldn't read the book if they knew it was written by a woman. Sooo 20th century! I don't think so many boys read it in any case if, like our son, they shunned books in favour of more 21st century forms of boyhood entertainment.

Anyways, the point is that publishers choose the personality (in JR's case the sex, or lack of it, too) of their authors. I wonder how long it will take for an author to be entirely manufactured. Like the girl bands of the nineties. Won't need to worry about whether they can write good books or not, they could either get a half-decent 'ghost' writer to do the writing for them or, for that matter, feed in the criteria as a ChatGPT request.

If we don't want this to happen, perhaps the solution is to invent our own authors. We could invent ourselves, reinvent ourselves or create a collective publishing operation that determines that we ARE all capable authors who can sell as well as write books. The trick is, not to settle for a TS or a challenge win on Vocal, but to find a way to get our work out there in the real world, the world outside of Vocal communities, the real world of Twitter-X, Facebook, TikTok and Insta. Ultimately, the world of externally curated publishing.

Dare I say it, the real world of the bookstore?

Would it work, could it work? Only one way to find out.

Publish and be damned

If you dare