I read a stat recently that said that there are more than 100,000 songs uploaded on streaming platforms every day. Every single day. I did the math and that’s over 36 million songs a year.
Now, I’m no mathematician, but my guess is that it’s not possible for every one of the 36 million songs to get any significant kind of attention.
Billboard has a top-hundred chart, TikTok has a pseudo kind of chart and there are a bunch of other indicators of which songs are being heard, even in niche categories.
Even if I was super generous and assumed that one million songs break through every year (which does not happen at all), that still leaves over 35 million songs lingering in obscurity, along with their creators.
Being a writer, my mind immediately shifted to the publishing industry. And while the annual figures are not nearly as staggering as music, publishing still pumps out about four million books globally every year. Of that figure, just over two million are self-published.
The volume is tremendous, but not efficient. And I had a thought about what it means for authors to have this number of books competing for attention and how publishing is handling it (or not handling it).
Then I had another, more conflicting thought: is publishing better off with gatekeepers?
More specifically, what I’m asking is if we’re better off with open access to writing and publishing a book solely on the grounds of if we have an idea and internet connection? Or were we better off when traditional publishing acted as gatekeepers for the majority of books that entered the world?
Before you rush to judgment and automatically side with the former, let’s actually talk about this.
I’m going to split this argument into a few parts and since I already mentioned access, let’s start there.
There’s no argument that technology has helped increase access to publishing. Not only do writers no longer need publishers to get their books out to the world, there are multiple platforms that present authors with options on how they want their stories to be shared and consumed.
Just this morning, I read this Note about author
. Her publishing deal fell through so she decided to release her novel on Substack. The result? Over 200 paid followers after the release of just her first chapter and over 10k followers on other social media platforms (she is far passed that now). Quite the success.We’ve reached a point now where access hasn’t just increased, but technology has literally eliminated any barriers to publishing. This is a good thing, right?
Except that now it’s not just writers putting out books. Now a shop owner named Kirby from across the street who thinks he’ll try his hand at writing a book is also publishing. Now Sarah from Olean, New York - an accountant who has never really thought of writing a book but her friend told her it’s a good idea because Sarah has an interesting life story - is also publishing a book.
That’s good and well, but neither Kirby nor Sarah really care about writing. And maybe that’s fine too, but their books are beside authors who consider themselves writers; writers who have spent the better part of their spare time learning the craft, attending conferences, writing every day because it’s what they genuinely love to do.
Authors who want this to be their career.
But maybe Sarah and Kirby have better connections. They’re able to get placed on regional and national platforms which helps bring awareness to their books. This awareness helps them sell 500-1000 copies a year, far more than the average author. More importantly, it helps drive more attention to what Sarah and Kirby are really passionate about - their respective businesses.
This is how unlimited access works. It democratizes an industry so that anyone can have access. But unlimited access comes at a price.
I want you to imagine for a second that anyone could become a doctor. I don’t even need to finish that thought for you to recognize how ridiculous it is. But what if we let anyone become an architect, or a scientist, or an engineer? Still ridiculous? Okay, what about teachers? Social workers?
What I’m trying to show you here is that your reaction to the democratization of these institutions is likely tied to the potential risk involved in the outcome of their vocation. So if anyone could be a doctor, the risk of people dying would increase exponentially. But the risk associated with someone becoming an author means there are more books in the world. Harmless, right?
But is it really harmless?
If books are so harmless, why is there such a concentrated effort to ban specific ones? If books have little cultural significance, why do we turn them into films? Why are we still reading and studying books from centuries ago to learn about our history and how that connects us to our present?
I think we have it all wrong.
What if stories are the most important fuel for our culture? What if the risk of not telling stories through books means that less people get to see themselves, less people get to experience something outside of their environments, less people get to be stimulated because of a writer’s imagination?
These are some of the potential outcomes of increasing access and removing all barriers to becoming an author. Sarah and Kirby are mixed with you and me, which brings me to my next point.
Quality.
What gatekeepers assess is the quality of the work. They set the standard that anyone who wants to enter must follow. But who gets to determine that quality? Who gets to publish the stories that influence the way we see the world?
This is where things get icky. Because for centuries, race, gender and sexual orientation have been limiting factors for many hopeful authors. Some of that is changing, but the industry — meaning the workers in the industry, not the authors — is still over 70% white and over 70% female. That’s according to both, a Lee & Low survey (2024) and a PEN America study. PEN America actually puts the number closer to 80% white.
These are U.S. numbers, but I’m from Canada and the figures are the same. They’re also similar in the U.K.
Okay, so what about the authors you ask? McGill University conducted the most comprehensive study. They evaluated over 8,000 fiction books from 1950-2018 written by 4,100 authors and discovered that 95% of the authors were white (The books they evaluated were published by large publishing houses).
I know those numbers sound unbelievable, so let me quote McGill directly:
“Between 1950 and 2000, 97 per cent of authors published by the literary giant Random House were white. White novelists represented 98 per cent of the authors who appeared on bestseller lists, 91 per cent of those who won major literary awards, and 90 per cent of those who had books reviewed in prestigious literary magazines. (For context, in 2000, white people made up 75.1 per cent of the overall U.S. population.)”
I think you get the picture.
With this type of inequality, it’s tough not to argue against gatekeeping. Look at how many groups were/are left out. I know from other research I’ve done that author diversity has increased by about 5% in 2024, but it’s obviously still very much an issue. Plus when you add the current book bans into the mix, over 80% of the books being banned are from marginalized groups, including LGBTQIA++ and Black authors.
These stats should end any talk of gatekeeping, right? Publishing left on its own has clearly failed to provide the access that would seem representative of readers and the general population.
So without gatekeeping, the public becomes the arbiter of what is quality. More specifically, readers are the ones left to decide which stories and authors should be elevated. So does this work?
If only there was an example of a platform where readers en masse had the power to push a book past the historical bias of publishing and into the forefront. Hmmm, let me think…
Well, there is this small space called BookTok that gets billions of impressions every day. There aren’t any comprehensive studies yet on the makeup of authors spawned by BookTok, but so far, the authors who have blown up include Colleen Hoover, Sarah J. Maas, Taylor Jenkin Reid…yeah, you see where I’m going with this.
But I don’t want to get stuck on the race thing. My exploration in this section is about the quality of writing. The quality of writing diminishes when there are no standards; that’s just logic. But how are readers able to determine which stories are quality and which ones are not?
This question leads us to another industry that has been disrupted: media.
Since the printing press made the mass marketing of books a thing, the media has been responsible for the names we remember the most. From Dickens’ stories being serialized in Penny Dreadfuls to Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight flooding bookstores and dominating box offices, the media has always been the vehicle that drives the publishing industry.
But in the last decade, we’ve seen those institutions collapse. We’ve all mourned the loss of countless magazines and newspapers, including literary magazines like The Believer and Readers Digest Canada, which were responsible for publishing so many aspiring writers. And losses like those say nothing about the dwindling media landscape in general, where so many more popular brands have severely cut their staff numbers and reduced their publications to their simplest form.
This disruption hasn’t been all bad. Platforms like Substack are thriving because they created a space for some of the journalists previously working in those institutions to still make a living. YouTube has also become a powerful source of independent media, and Twitter pre-X was my go-to for the most important news and entertainment stories of the day.
But this fragmentation means that authors must work hard to stay “plugged in” to who and what is having the most influence. Since they can no longer rely on large institutions, today’s author must identify and locate the right influencers on the right platform to help spread the word of their books.
But my question is this: is what I just described conducive to the elimination of gatekeeping or have we simply traded in one set of gatekeepers for a wider group?
Let’s go back to BookTok for a minute. BookTok is supposed to be the ultimate representation of democracy. The idea is that any author at any time can blow up on BookTok and become a star. As readers organically find your book and share it to their BookTok audience, you get even more attention than you would if you were a guest on a popular morning show.
But is that really the case?
It’s true that BookTok readers initially discovered books organically, but now publishers mail out physical copies to these same influencers. And now that BookTok has become the most powerful tool for pushing authors, we are beginning to notice some of the same biases formally set by the publishing industry, including impediments to access. For example, have you ever tried reaching out to a BookToker? How many self-published authors has BookTok blown up?
On top of that, the manner in which books are reviewed on BookTok, often reduced to singular tropes (enemy to friends) or simple plot structures, has impacted the type of books publishers are printing. In trying to appeal to the BookTok trends, the quality of writing is moved to the side in order to make room for whatever is most popular. And that popularity is being set largely by BookTok.
Does any of this sound familiar to you?
I started this conversation off by saying bring back gatekeepers. But the truth is that gatekeepers never went anywhere. They’ve simply scattered to different parts of the internet or transformed into something less recognizable.
But they’re still here. They always will be. Which means unless a writer is willing, able, and committed to building their own community, we will always be at the whims of gatekeepers, no matter the form they take.
What do you think about Gatekeepers? Am I wrong to say that they’re still here? Was it much different when big publishers were the only gatekeepers?
Wow! What a thought-provoking and well put together post. I think you're right that the gatekeepers have simply shifted, and at least for me personally, I feel like the only way to proceed as a writer while keeping my sanity is staying true to my work and my vision, if at the same time finding ways to work with whatever changing tides/gatekeepers is going on as best as I can. But I will say, as a white girl I fully acknowledge that I haven't had to face some of the specific challenges and hurdles that many others face, and in my world of kid lit I'm really grateful for organizations like We Need Diverse Books (https://diversebooks.org/) that are doing great work to slowly but hopefully surely bring improvement and progress to the industry.
A thought-provoking post! I'm ambivalent about Gatekeepers. The proliferation of books that are being self-published does make it harder for an author to break-through, if you will. But I've seen a lot of books that just don't look very high quality and I would hope that readers who are discerning will be able to discern that. If people want to self-publish, let them. I probably won't read those books anyway. As someone who would like to be traditionally published and wears multiple minority hats, I know the odds are against me especially because I don't fit the popular tropes. So yes, Gatekeeping can also kind of suck. I'm still very early into my book-writing though, so I guess I don't really know.