Seth’s Blog: Great writing, unfiltered

Seth’s Blog: Great writing, unfiltered:

The filter is important, sometimes. It keeps us focused and on time and from veering too far in the wrong direction. But in a Long Tail world, the filter is actually better off gone.

Anyone who’s ever spent time reading a publisher’s slush pile understands the importance of the filter. It’s not that you want the filter gone; it’s that you want the ability to build your own filters, and also leverage a wider number of filters to help find stuff.

“Eye of Argon” didn’t become publishable simply because it’s easier to publish now. It’s still crap (fun to read crap, as opposed to boring crap, or painfully bad crap, but still crap). But if you look at, say, the Science Fiction market, 99% of what people can read are filtered through maybe 20 people (magazine and acquisition editors). There’s still some very readable stuff that can’t get published because the traditional publishing environments have limited bandwidth they need to fill. The net makes it easier to get the rest of that good stuff out where it can be seen, but we shouldn’t pretend that ALL of the stuff that’s going to pop up out of the slush pile deserves to….

And I don’t think it’s worht anyone’s time to have to plow the slush pile. There’s still a need for filters to help focus us on the material worth spending time with. It’s just that the number of filters and filtering mechanisms are widening, not that they’re going away.

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