I’ve been thinking about organisations and their systems quite a lot lately. It’s easy to see the negative effects these can have when you look at say local government. In order to function, or so it believes, local government needs to be properly organised then exert control over what happens within it via systems. Once established, the organisation and its systems becomes more important, at least to itself, than the work it’s supposed to be doing. Hence, local governments often seem to work in the opposite direction to what local people actually want but because the system is working so smoothly it doesn’t matter. What people want is irrelevant. Or, rather, what people want must be what the system produces because the system works, doesn’t it?

Unfortunately, I don’t see it’s very different in publishing. Publishers are organisations and they produce books via various operational systems, one of which is genre. Putting a book into a genre saves time and money in that its audience can be easily identified, informed and sold to. The problem is, once the operating system becomes effective, at least in its own terms, it begins to exert control over the creative element. Then, genre becomes more important than quality of writing. Right at the source, the author is shaping his output to fit some genre or other, rather than pushing his creative boundaries.

Pitching has moved back down to the author, too. Pitching used to exist mostly at the reader end, with the blurb on the back of the book. And with some publishers, they didn’t even have blurbs: readers took their books on reputation of quality, or read some first in the book store or library. Then pitching moved to the sales teams pushing books to book stores and distributors. Then it moved to editors pitching to the sales team. Then to editors pitching to their editorial team. Now, authors need to pitch to their editors. And you don’t pitch on quality; you pitch on usefulness to the genre, to the system.

Do publishers’ systems work? Well, again, they must do else they wouldn’t exist. Perhaps a better question is: what’s the price of the publishing systems that work? I’d hazard a guess that quality is the price. Not that editors don’t like quality writing; of course they do. But it’s become increasingly irrelevant except perhaps to a minority of quality-seeking readers.

Which gives the quality-seeking author something of a dilemma, i.e. is it worth it?

Another problem with systems is that the end users have become conditioned to them too. When you go shopping in a supermarket, it’s much easier to go for the well-known brands, even if they might not be as good as the lesser-known ones. You know what you’re going to get. You don’t have to spend time researching the ingredients. Lots of other people agree the big brands are worth buying, so you have company. Better still, the big brands tend to be cheaper.

One argument against dropping the Net Book Agreement was that quality would suffer. Publishers would concentrate resources on their big brand name authors and, crucially, cut the cover price of those authors’ books. Which means the ‘mid-list’ authors, who perhaps tended to pursue quality more than genre-fit, would become an endangered species. Hmmmm . . .  

Has self-publishing broken this brand-price-quality conundrum? It may be too early to tell. However, so far, a lot of successful self-published books do seem to imitate traditional publishing’s brands, genres, styles, etc. Which makes sense: many readers of self-published books have been programmed by traditional publishers, and will probably still search for genre rather than quality, at least as a first thing. And, of course, a lot of self-publishing authors want to make sales now.

I believe there are a whole lot of readers out there who look for quality first. However, it will take them time to find it in the vast ocean of self-published work available. And how does the quality-producing author help them to find his work? After all, he needs to describe it in some way, and many self-publishing outlets insist he ‘tag’ it with recognisable genre labels. All of which means, quality authors finding quality-loving readers will take a lot longer than with genre-to-genre relationships.

Maybe a new genre is needed. Something like the IT’S NOT WHAT I EXPECTED, BUT IT’S REALLY GOOD genre. Which by its title alone would challenge authors to do something different with the genre they may feel trapped by. It might even in time attract readers who are fed up with the DON’T EXPECT MUCH OTHER THAN COPY-CAT IDEAS, PREDICTABLE PLOTS AND STEREOTYPICAL CHARACTERS BUT, HEY, WHAT THE HELL, AT LEAST IT FITS THE GENRE genre.