I like to watch pop culture reviews of movies and the industry more than I ingest movies. But something became plain to me that I already kind of realised but hadn't fully accepted.
There was no such thing as gatekeeping in the publishing industry. If you had the money and connections, or one or the other, if you had the tenacity without the talent, you could still get a book published even if it was bad.
Valley of the Dolls is apparently an utter piece of trash made by a woman so disillusioned from failing to find Hollywood fame, but as she was able to game the system a touch, she was able to get some attention, she got it. And it got a movie adaptation that went through a lot of problems before it was realised and later criticised. When it was explained to me by one YouTuber, it all sounded sooooooo familiar.
I knew about pulp books, I didn't put them in that same bucket where they exist to make a buck and nothing else. Romance novels have never claimed to be literary masterpieces, they know their place in the industry and exist within a popular market. The gatekeepers weren't that strong, they weren't the grand, discerning sentinels I held in high regard and respect. You could work around them all this time. Hubbard did it, others still do it. You work around the barriers and defy logic and once you're out there making money, everyone wants a piece. The only difference is, it's infinitely easier to get a piece of work into the market on your own. It's getting it noticed, a certain number of things have to lock into place, then it's seen. And people seem to care less and less about this.
Even getting a book out there from a crowdfunding perspective, it still impresses the people around you to produce something physical, something of substance, something they can hold, if you can make it look good (it still matters, I promise), how it got out there means very little, if nothing.
I did reach out to a guy who's got his own website and got his books out there via crowdsource, I said hey ND author, I'm an ND too, you wanna check out this picture book I made that impressed so many people but not enough to buy it? I won't hear anything. I'm used to radio silence. I'm used to being ignored, it is something I've dealt with my whole life. I can process rejection better in most cases. Whether I find a comfort in being rejected by the industry, I kind of have now. Kind of.
It seems like all other art forms - movies, music, art - are so much kinder to independents. Publishing was the one industry that demonised anyone who had the audacity to try and put their work out there without an agent and a company backing it. Someone's SoundCloud account might have awful music, but people don't tend to attack you for uploading it, they might get irritated by you trying to share it, they might get pissed about it showing up on a Spotify list should you go that far. But it's never, to me, seemed to be a masturbatory, disgraceful act like it is with publishing. At least, that's how it felt when I was trying to get noticed. It's not enough to do it yourself, you must be seen by the important people to reach any validation. Then someone with less shame and more connections manages to disprove this notion, and people like me are left infuriated. All I got wrong was, this was a recent thing.
It wasn't. Even the Marque de Sade would never have been published by someone reputable now, it was utter filth, but it reached the public regardless. It was still commodified.
There are no gatekeepers, and the gates themselves hang rusty off their hinges.
