Professional publishing is fiat publishing, while indie publishing is free market publishing. The professional publishing industry, which consists of the “Big 5” book publishers (Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Hachette Book Group, and Simon & Schuster) and literary agencies, are like central banks in the economy: they manipulate the market and create artificial scarcity by limiting which authors and books can be published. Indie publishing (self-publishing and small independent presses) is the free market for books, as it has a more natural flow of supply and demand. Everyone has the same opportunity, and success is more closely correlated with merit—or how much readers actually enjoy a book.

The professional publishers theoretically serve as gatekeepers to ensure only high quality books are published. This may have been true in the past, but in recent years the gatekeepers are often more concerned with the ideology of a book than its artistic quality. They seek to publish books that promote their preferred worldview and reject talented authors who do not share their ideology while propping up less-talented authors who do. In essence, the gatekeepers think they know what you want to read more than you do, just as the central bankers think they know how to spend your money better than you do. It is the same problem with movies in Hollywood.

There was a time in the past when the mainstream publishing institutions served a vital role in discovering and promoting the absolute best literary talent (the Hemingways, Faulkners, Joyces, and Fitzgeralds). This was in the early days of those institutions, when they were being run by the founders who built the companies from the ground up. A publishing house and agency could only rise to success by providing good books people actually wanted to read. After decades of success, those institutions developed monopolistic power in the publishing industry. With monopoly power comes complacency, bureaucracy, decadence, and decay. They could afford to lower the quality of the books being published while the new people working at those institutions rode the coattails of their predecessors’ success. That was until Amazon opened the floodgates and provided indie competition to the established publishing houses.

The dirty secret of the publishing industry is that the Big 5 make most of their money from the back catalog of classic books they published decades ago. They maintain the copyright and sell millions of copies of these 50+ year-old books each year—mostly because they are required reading at schools (such as To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee and The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger). These perennial classics subsidize the cost of their new books that fail to make any money. Publishers don’t have to waste any money editing or marketing those classic books, so it’s all profit for them. The Big 5 can afford to publish an endless line of ideological “pet project” books that repeatedly lose money because George Orwell and Ray Bradbury still continually top the bestseller list. But eventually the copyright on the classics will expire, putting those books into the public domain. Relying on the classics is only a short-term measure, keeping the Big 5 publishers afloat. They are not developing new authors who will be future classics. It’s not just that people are reading fewer books than they used to (though that is part of the problem), but the gatekeepers are failing to identify the top talent today, who instead are resorting to self-publish. Most of the best fiction books I read over the past five years were over twenty years old, but of those released within the last five years, most were independently published.

The Big 5 publishers will defend their gatekeeping by pointing at all the self-published crap flooding Amazon. That is true, there is a lot of self-published crap not worth reading, especially now with LLMs. But there are also gems among the dregs, like The Martian or Fifty Shades of Grey, both originally self-published. The Martian was both commercially and critically acclaimed, and led to a successful Hollywood movie. While E.L. James is no Jane Austen, her book sold millions of copies despite being derided by critics. It is exactly the type of book modern gatekeepers would reject because it is too “problematic.” I never read the book—it is not my cup of tea—but I would never try to control what other readers enjoy. Of course, once Fifty Shades became a smash hit on Amazon, the Big 5 publishers came calling, wanting to get a cut of the action. Just as the central banks will come calling late to the party to try to cash in on Bitcoin.

Self-publishing is the ultimate free market in literature because anyone can publish a book, and it is entirely up to the author what they publish. The author controls the quality and can make their book as professional as a Big 5 publisher—or not, and just do a quick and dirty option. But having many low-quality books available does not inhibit the merit of the high-quality books. The cream eventually rises to the top.

It is the same with cryptocurrency. Having thousands of alt-coins (or shit coins), does not inhibit Bitcoin, the cream of crypto, which remains on top. If people want to speculate on low-quality alt-coins, that is their prerogative. Likewise, if a reader wants to read pulpy trash, that is their choice. Just because there’s a book about dinosaur erotica doesn’t diminish Moby Dick—Melville’s novel is still a masterpiece no matter how many terrible books are published and sold on the same (virtual) shelves.

The beauty of the free market is that entrepreneurs have the freedom to create whatever they want, and consumers have the freedom to buy whatever they want. Naturally, those products of greatest value to the consumer will sell most, rewarding the entrepreneur who provides it. This is the same in publishing—or at least in indie publishing.

“Professional” publishing could more rightly be called “fiat” publishing—because the market is manipulated by centralized gatekeepers. In the fiat monetary system, the Federal Reserve manipulates the dollar with artificial interest rates and quantitative easing, and the Federal government manipulates markets with regulations and subsidies. This coerces consumers into buying things the gatekeepers want them to buy, rather than what consumers would buy devoid of those subsidies and regulations that inflate or deflate the natural price. In the fiat publishing system, centralized gatekeepers choose favorites and decide which authors get published, promoted on the shelves at book stores, and get newspaper reviews and television interviews. Books don’t get prime placement at Barnes and Noble because they are bestsellers; they are bestsellers because they get prime placement. Only a market without centralized gatekeepers is free. Indie publishing is the free market of books because every writer has the same opportunity to succeed or fail. Ultimate success is based on the merit of their work—as it should be.

The United States does not have a true free market because of the Fed’s monetary policy and government subsidies/regulations that manipulate the economy. Businesses in the fiat system use lobbying and propaganda to convince government gatekeepers to finance them and/or regulate their competition, giving them an unfair advantage, rather than facing the free market and selling directly to consumers and succeeding/failing based on the quality of their products. Our economy is not a free market but a “fiat market,” and the publishing industry operates the same way.

The New York Times was forced to reveal in court that their national bestseller list is hand-selected and curated by editors, not an actual reflection of the best-selling books. “The Times, which had always claimed that the list was compiled from computer sales, countered in court that its list ‘was not mathematically objective but was editorial content and thus protected under the Constitution as free speech.’ …the New York Times bestseller list was ‘editorial content, not objective factual content’ and that they had the right to exclude whatever book they wanted.” For years, having the stamp of “New York Times Bestseller” on the cover of your book automatically led to more sales. But that stamp was given by gatekeepers, not earned through merit. Gatekeepers like the NYT, publishing companies, and agents served vital roles in the past, but they are no longer needed thanks to the technology of print-on-demand and self-publishing. The primary role for those gatekeepers now is to influence the culture by promoting only those authors who share their ideology.

Success is a prison of conformity. Acceptance by mainstream gatekeepers forces an artist to forever conform to mainstream ideology. The current ideology of New York agents and publishing houses isn’t the same ideology held by those institutions three decades ago, and three decades from now it will undoubtedly change again. If an author wishes to be published by such mainstream gatekeepers, they will need to shift their ideology accordingly. Self-publishing provides insurance for intellectual freedom. Instead of adapting one’s ideology to current social consensus, a self-published author can base their ideology on core truth. Indie authors are free to write fiction based on the eternal truths of human nature rather than the fleeting fancies of publishing gatekeepers.

In the free market, companies constantly rise and fall. The former winners become complacent and are replaced by startups that take risks to disrupt them with new ideas and better products. It is not destined that the “Big 5” publishers remain the big five forever (and not just because they keep merging). It is natural for new publishing companies to rise to power and put the old ones out of business.

Thankfully, there are a growing number of independent small presses that grant their authors the artistic freedom of self-publishing while also giving them the benefit of a publisher (i.e. professional editing, cover design, and promotion). That may be the best of both worlds. Like the original founders of the Big 5 publishing houses, they are building new literary institutions from the ground up. If such small presses become successful enough, they may force the Big 5 publishers to open their ideological gates to compete—or those new presses will become a part of the new mainstream themselves.