Wanted: Gatekeepers

In praise of Upstream Reviews

In this post, I wish to praise Upstream Reviews, but first, I want to talk about why I feel they and similar ventures are so valuable.

Once upon a time, in the long-ago dreamtime of Indie publishing, there was great celebration. Traditional publishing was so difficult, so limited, so claustrophobic. Indie publishing was about to set us all free. No limits.

No gatekeepers.

No big meanies keeping our books from reaching eager readers because they happen to hold a different ideology.

It was going to set writers free.

Only, like the little comic where someone defiantly leaps over a fence…that turns out to be a guardrail over a cliff, big meanies objecting to alternate ideologies was not the only purpose of gatekeepers.

One of the other purposes was: quality.

If someone reads a good book, they often want to read another one. “Hey, I just read this great book. Do you know anything like it? Can you recommend another?”

But when they read a bad book, they tend to put the book aside and go do something else: watch a movie, watch a video, go for a walk, play a video game.

Anything but read a book.

And when everyone can publish anything they want, chances of getting a bad book out of the grab bag of indie books is high.

Just so you don’t think I’m casting shade on my fellow authors, let me tell you a story:

In the 90s, I wrote my first novel. I sent it to my agent. He got a job with Tor…so he became my editor. But he was pretty busy.

Took him six years to get back to me.

Six years.

That’s a long time to wait. For anything.

Nowadays, I would probably have given up and gone indie.

But back then, I wanted to do things right. Right meant getting into a big publisher. So as I waited, I rewrote the entire book, then two books, and, eventually, after Tor bought it but wanted a trilogy, a third book.

I learned a tremendous amount during those six rewrites. It became a better book. I became a better writer.

By the time Tor published it, it was a much better book than it had been in 1998. It was published to all sorts of lovely starred reviews from Kirkus, Publisher’s Weekly, Library Journal, etc.

The finished product was a much better book. I know this. If you read them both, you would know this. The readers and reviewers would recognize this.

But do you know who did not know this? Who had absolutely no clue?

1998 me.

When I first finished the book, I thought it was great. It wasn’t. It needed a lot of work.

But 1998 me had no clue.

If 1998 me had existed today, she might never have learned how poor her first try was and how much better it could be. She might have waited a year or a few months, and then gone indie.

She might have despaired when no one really liked the book.

Just the other day, I commented on a video, and a stranger recognized my name and told me that he has reread my series once a year, every year, since it came out.

Best thing that happened to me in a while!

But I can assure you, it would not have happened if I had gone indie in 1998 and never put in the sweat and hard work of truly learning the craft.

So, to return to our main topic: No gatekeepers, no quality control.

This is bad for readers and, as we see above, it can be bad for writers, too.

On top of quality, there are other things gatekeepers can do for us. There are ideologies we might not wish to read, genres we don’t really enjoy, and other qualities that an editor might bring to choosing books that is missing from a random Amazon search.

Having someone whose judgment you trust who can tell you which books are worth reading is…well, it’s a lot more valuable than we realized!

It’s more than a decade since the great “no gatekeepers” celebration, and we find ourselves adrift on a sea of books. Books, books, everywhere, and not a drop to read…er…I mean, not a good book in sight.

So how do we find good books?

The answer is: we need gatekeepers.

Specifically, we need voluntary gatekeepers, such as review sites, that have similar taste or values. So we can find books we might actually enjoy reading.

And people who might like our books can find them, too.

One such site is Upstream Reviews.

Upstream Reviews on Substack

Andrew Breitbart is famous for having discerned that culture is upstream of politics.

This translates to: you cannot change the politics—the way people vote and what they want in their government—unless you change culture first.

Upstream Reviews takes its name from this concept. The site endeavors to review books that have a chance of fanning the flames of the kind of culture in which we would like to live: a culture where virtue and heroism are lauded, and vices and vileness are not.

If you like books that are heroic, Superversive, Iron Age, Pulp Rev. or any number of other modern movements that strike not to fall into the trap currently called by the term Woke, this site is for you.

If you want to know which Indie books are worth reading, this site is for you.

If you want to know which series—books or TV—you might be able to enjoy without wanting to rip your eyes out, this site is for you.

We need more sites like this. Places we can go to find works that might appeal to us that we tell each other about—so that readers can find books, and authors can find readers.

Give Upstream Reviews a visit. Tell a friend. Even subscribe.

Maybe you’ll even find a book you truly love!

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Know of other good review sites or places to find Indie books worth reading? Let us know below!