In praise of gatekeeping and branding

They've got bad reputations but are essential to book publishing

At root I see a publisher’s work as deciding what to publish, and in so doing to create a reputation for the house that’s attractive to potential authors and readers. These happen to be two phenomena that go by unpleasant names—gatekeeping and branding—and come in for a lot of criticism these days. Gatekeeping seems undemocratic and exclusionary; branding is, according to many serious people, focused on perception over substance.

I want to defend gatekeeping and branding, or at least provide a publisher-side perspective on their importance. And my instinct, like that of a lot of Gen X-ers, is to help make sense of the world through old Simpsons references—specifically the International Brotherhood of Jazz Dancers, Pastry Chefs, and Nuclear Technicians from the episode with the strike. (You remember: “Dental plan. Lisa needs braces.”)

Flipping through some publishers’ seasonal catalogs, I’m reminded of the IBJDPC&NT. There’s nothing wrong with seeing a book on James Joyce announced next to a guide to Mexican billfish, but in cases like these the whole (the publishing house) feels like less than the sum of its parts (the individual books it publishes). There isn’t really a reason to think a publisher that does the Joyce book well will also do a bang-up job with the billfish one. And the catalog, in its diffuseness, is unlikely to make its publishing house a destination. Books will be interpreted individually rather than as manifestations of a publisher’s sensibility.

What I mean to convey is that deciding what to publish is important, and it’s a question not just of quality but of fit. That fit can be characterized by subject matter or book type (Transit Books is heavy on translation, for instance) or there can be a unifying vibe (see various fan-generated conversations about whether there’s an “A24 of book publishing”). In some cases a publisher’s sensibility is manifested in consistent design across books. Think of the wall of titles from New York Review of Books at some indie bookstores—books that look similar and become a retail category, helping establish a taxonomy for bookstore customers.

The benefits of gatekeeping and branding may seem obvious—readers are buying authors’ books from those publisher-branded bookstore displays—but these aspects of publishing generate suspicion from multiple perspectives. In some circles, publishing is increasingly understood as a service that shouldn’t be withheld from authors of publishable work, whether they’re jazz dancers, pastry chefs, or nuclear technicians. A few years back I had the chance to talk with library publishers (a vocal segment of the university-based publishing world) about how conventional houses decide what to publish, and I was dismissed by a member of the audience for talking about what amounted, he said sniffily, to branding. So you’ll see a library-based publisher announce disparate titles on conflict resolution, wine, and online teaching—all of it absolutely fine, but not apparently concerned with a unifying sensibility.

At the other end of the spectrum are large houses where cultivation of a consistent tone or focus becomes difficult given the scale of the operation, and maybe because of a desire to publish powerful, problematic authors. My colleague Meg Reid jokes: “One very cool thing about publishing with an independent press is that you probably won't wake up on a Wednesday morning to find you now share a publisher with Mike Pence.” That’s because most indie presses are gatekeeping out the Mike Pences of the world, instead of currying their favor with expensive book deals. Not so at Simon & Schuster (what’s their brand?), where CEO Jonathan Karp defended the Pence deal with reference to the house’s “mission to publish a diversity of voices and perspectives.”

Publishers who successfully navigate branding and gatekeeping know that what you don’t publish is as important as what you do. They often cluster at the independent, small, and progressive end of things, rather than cozying up to influential right-wing figures (whether internet trolls or university presidents). Ask most people about the valence of gatekeeping, and you’re likely to hear it’s an intrinsically conservative phenomenon. But like a lot of the discourse about publishing, conversations about gatekeeping and branding would be well-served by more nuanced attention to how the concepts play out on the ground, in the practical work of publishers.