When "Gatekeeping" Isn't

The term "gatekeeping" is often misused when referencing book publishing, and I have opinions on that subject.

These days when you hear the term “gatekeeping” thrown a conversation it usually means someone trying to keep another person out of a hobby, community, or other location they have every right to be in. Such as, “You can’t be a Metallica fan if you can’t name at least five albums!” I’m going to say right now, I’m not here for that. You can enjoy a band without naming five albums. You can enjoy a television show without knowing all the actors. You can be a fan of something without consuming every single piece of side lore and connecting comic book.

When we get into publishing, the term “gatekeeper” is hurled around to refer to anyone who imposes restrictions on who and cannot publish, and it’s usually used as a slight. I want to draw some important distinctions between the kind of gatekeeper who tries to keep someone out of a fandom and the places where that term absolutely does not apply.

As a note: There are many people who write for pleasure and just put things out there because why not. I’m not talking about hobbyists in this post, I am focused exclusively on people who are attempting to publish for profit. If you write just for fun or aren’t yet looking at selling your work, not a bit of this is aimed at you.

Publishing is a business, not a game.

The first thing I want to address here is that if we are talking publishing novels or other content to platforms for purchase there is a significant difference between that and someone telling others they need to have read a certain number of tie-in novels in order to be a fan of Star Wars.

Publishing a work for profit is a different arena, and you leave the sphere of just a creative or a hobbyist (mostly) and enter the realm of an entrepreneur. While, yes, you absolutely can just upload a Word .docx file to Amazon with a cover you made in MS Paint, and Amazon won’t stop you, you really shouldn’t. If you’re pitching your book to a traditional publisher, you are asking them to invest around $10,000 of equity into your book before they see a return on their investment.

This means that once you enter the game of trying to produce products for money, the field immediately changes. Nobody owes you their time, their money, their attention, or their focus. Nobody owes you reviews (good or bad). Nobody owes you anything. Instead, the onus is on us writers to attract readers through the quality of our writing, editing, cover design, and marketing.

I am laying these things out because one of the things that happens in writing groups (particularly indie writing groups) is if someone tells a person that they are not ready for publication or that they should hire a professional editor or cover designer, they are often snarled at and accused of “gatekeeping.” I, as a professional editor, have been accused of gatekeeping more than once when I told someone they should not expect to be able to publish books for free and have them be of any quality.

The reality is that in business, you need to invest in your product in order to earn income. There are no ways around that. There are no shortcuts. The alternative to investing money is typically investing time. As the old saying goes, “Fast, cheap, or quality? Pick two.” That is just as true in publishing as it is in the rest of the world. If you don’t have the ability to do anything but “cheap” then you are either going to publish fast and have poor quality or have to put in a lot of sweat equity.

Agents and acquisitions editors are not the enemy.

Before we go any further, I fully acknowledge traditional publishing’s history of poor representation of marginalized groups and women. That has changed dramatically with the rise of indie publishing, and while there is still more work to do, the landscape no longer resembles the bad old days. Is there systemic racism and sexism and ableism and so on? Yes. Things are, however, better than even when I started sixteen years ago. I see no reason to expect they will not continue to improve.

Now that we have that out of the way, I want to talk traditional publishing. I’m not here to persuade you to choose traditional publishing over indie publishing, but there are some important things to know traditional publishing that you’re not going to see much of in writing spaces online.

In many writing spaces, people will cast aspersions on agents and acquisitions editors like they are the bad guys who are preventing authors from being published. Having been an acquisitions editor who owned a small press, I can say with categorical truth that most of the books I rejected were just plain not ready for publication and would not have been cost effective for our team to work on. Those authors had a lot to learn about the bones of writing before they were ready to do so professionally.

I want to be specific here: I don’t mean things not to my taste. These weren’t art pieces I didn’t understand. One person re-wrote The Old Man and The Sea in “haiku.” It wasn’t even haiku. When I say poor quality writing, I mean pieces that had absolutely zero concept of pacing, were poorly punctuated in the extreme, and pieces that were written with very little skill.

Those people weren’t worthless or hopeless by any stretch. I don’t view writers that way. However, these people were trying to play Carnegie Hall as first year violinists who could maybe scratch out “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.” They just plain weren’t ready for what publishing requires. As with many things in the arts, there are a great many people out there who fancy themselves ready for a professional career when they are just plain not ready.

Their job isn’t to stand in the way of your dreams.

The job of an acquisitions editor or agent is to choose pieces that are positioned to sell by authors who are ready to do the work of selling their book. Their job is to sort through the coal until they find diamonds. Now, not every individual does their job well, and there are plenty of people who pass up on excellent works for reasons I disagree with. However, that does not make the whole group of them the bad guys.

The cost of doing business is not “gatekeeping.”

Right now, self-publishing is considered by many “the one true way.” Now, I don’t think self-publishing is in any way bad or less valid, but the extreme focus on that angle ignores some very stark realities of publishing books of quality: the cost.

Publishing a book is not a free exercise despite the fact that it doesn’t cost you anything to upload a manuscript to Amazon, Draft2Digital, or IngramSpark. That said, producing a book is not a free or cheap exercise if you want to have a high-quality product at the end of it.

The most expensive part of publishing, hands down, is the editing. In a traditional publishing house, a manuscript often goes through three rounds of editing of various types. Each round easily costs around $1,200-$3,000. Or more, if it’s an extremely long manuscript. Cover art routinely costs between $300 - $3,000 (with the high end being hand-painted works by top artists). Typesetting is also not a cheap exercise since professional publishers don’t use Atticus or Vellum; they hand-typeset their books in programs like Affinity Publisher or InDesign.

Like with any professional industry, creating a product has a cost associated with it. In indie publishing, authors are on the line for the costs of their books. Full stop. Now, can you get away with spending less than I cited? Yes, you probably can. You could do fewer rounds of editing, get a premade cover, and use Atticus or Vellum or other things. However, cutting costs does have an impact on the quality of the book. Just like cutting costs in any production has an impact on the quality of the item.

To put it in another perspective: if you want really high quality food, you need to buy good quality ingredients. Do they need to be the most expensive on the market? No. Though that often does change the flavor. If you’re just starting out, you may focus on getting good quality in a few, specific ingredients and cutting costs in other areas. That’s fine. You don’t need to buy like a Michelin star restaurant if you’re opening a local diner for the first time. However, if you purchase the most inexpensive ingredients you can and cut corners, your product just plain won’t be as good.

That said, if you have enough skill and ingenuity, using cheaper ingredients doesn’t mean it has to be awful quality. It means you need to account for the reality of using inexpensive ingredients by knowing how to prepare what you have and handling those items properly.

Books are the same in that way. The old adage, “You get what you pay for,” is absolutely true. Knowing that, you may need to take care and invest a whole lot of elbow grease and learning time into the early part of your career to account for a lack of finances.

This is not “gatekeeping” as it’s so often termed. The reality of business is not someone trying to artificially keep poor people out of the race. Being traditionally published erases the amount of financial risk an author needs to absorb in order to bring their book to print. That’s one of the reasons it remains a viable path for authors without the means to do things solo.

The difference between quality control and gatekeeping.

Another uncomfortable truth is something I’ve mentioned a few times, but I want to talk about it a little more in depth here. Quality control is not the same thing as “gatekeeping.” From a reader perspective, I wish Amazon had more strict quality control guidelines than they do because I have wasted money many times on books that were abject garbage. With the introduction of AI-produced “novels,” consumers often have few protections against things that are just plain atrocious.

Finding good books in the ocean of works that are entirely unedited and hurried to print just for the purposes of trying to make a quick buck is a challenge unless one sticks to traditionally-published authors and known names. As someone who loves supporting indies, I am unwilling to eschew them in favor of exclusively purchasing books published by the Big Five.

As an author and editor, I wish there was more quality control so I didn’t need to compete against the fear many authors have of indie books because those fears are so frequently legitimate. There are a lot of truly poor quality books for sale that would never have been picked up by a traditional publisher.

Gatekeeping used in the sense as the initial example (“name five Metallica albums to prove you’re a fan!”) is an artificial way of barring someone from a community they feel like they should belong to. It’s a way to make others feel superior and self-important. Quality control is trying to prevent people from having to experience awful products (or dangerous ones, in the case of some industries). While a badly-edited book won’t kill someone like undercooked meat could, if the whole pool is flooded with bad quality books, it becomes a question of “if there’s a turd in the pool, are you willing to swim in it anyway?” The ratio of turd to water is more than a pool but less than a pond, typically.

The immediate reaction to claim someone is “gatekeeping” when people say someone isn’t ready to publish is so frequent that I can practically set my watch by it in a thread in most public writing groups. I can understand it, to some extent. It’s easier to blame the people who are trying to lean into there being some kind of standards for quality (and I don’t mean to suggest that people being pedants and jerks are the ones in the right here — there are multiple Englishes and many style guides) than it is to acknowledge that your emperor has no clothes on.

So, what’s the takeaway?

Gatekeeping exists in publishing, and I won’t pretend otherwise. Historically speaking (and even currently), marginalized people have often faced prejudice that has prevented their voices from being heard. That is categorical fact I will not deny. However, a lot of the things people like to say are “gatekeeping” are often more related to the costs of doing business or realities of the market.

Authors advising people to spend money on editing and saying that if you cannot invest in your book, you shouldn’t self-publish until you can are not artificially creating barriers to entry. They are, in fact, sharing sensible business advice. Sometimes you just plain aren’t ready. Encouraging someone to traditionally publish if they cannot afford self-publishing is also not a cruelty. It may be the best way for that author to get their book into the world without having to invest a great deal of money into the process.

That’s the thing about all of this. There is a massive difference between artificial barriers to entry into a community and the realities of business. Quality is also a serious concern when you start getting into the business side of things. If you’re asking someone to give up their hard-won money in exchange for the thing you created, providing the best quality item possible is important.

Sure, you can price it at $0.99 and think of it as something you don’t really care about. That’s absolutely a tactic a person can take. However, is it really what you want? Most people don’t aspire to be bargain bin, after all, and I deeply doubt you spent weeks, months, or even years working on your book to devalue your time and energy like that. I’m not saying low pricing is a bad thing on a marketing level. Running promotions or lowballing the first book in a series are valid tactics for driving sales. However, if you’re not really intending to do it as a strategic positioning move, it seems almost self-defeating.

Instead, invest in your art, in your product, and in yourself. And if you cannot invest money, invest time and consider traditional publishing. You deserve more than to have your book be valued less than a hash brown at McDonald’s.