I stand between totalitarianism and capitalism myself — I tell people I’m a “capitalism-with-the-hell-regulated-out-of-it-ist.” Which means I think, even in publishing, a little bit of guidance here and there, in cooperation with a market system, will still work vastly better than a rampant market with no restraints.

As for the volume of garbage, I think you’re right. The thing is, you won’t be aware of most of it because the people producing it won’t have a marketing budget. There are already as many self-published books as commercially published books but the great majority are invisible. I’m confident that intermediaries will arise to filter it in all kinds of ways – including by quality.

The other is that authors won’t bother with editing and books will stand or fall on how well they were self-edited.

Probably both will happen, with a few, savvy, professional writers involving editors, and the great bulk of writers not bothering and taking their chances. (From what I can tell, most self-published writers don’t see the difference between a well-crafted book and the opposite – otherwise they would have been too embarrassed to publish their work in the first place.)

I suspect that, in the end, it will be ebooks which finally change the game. Companies like Smashwords, which have the software to help you assemble and present a book, manage all the commercial stuff and take a 15% cut on sales, look to me like the biggest challenge to current publishing.

This set-up does not solve the quality control problem but I see that coming from independent book review sites which will do, post hoc, what the agents and editors are now doing before the fact. These reviewers will build up strong reputations in each genre and will become the go-to guys for finding a good read.

Since publishing will be, effectively, free, there will no point in writers handing their work to third parties to publish. Every writer will just publish everything they write and let the market sort out what it wants to read and what it doesn’t. Power will then be in the hands of the reviewers and the smart review sites will probably crowd-source their end of the business. They will also, out of convenience, become the new book retailers.

Using the supermarket analogy you used – is the answer some sort of “local writing/publishing” movement, like the “local food” movement? What an interesting problem.

Must mull this for a while. But it would be interesting to hear what sort of ideas you have.

On the crossover thing (photos to fiction) I’m not sure you’ll get much mileage out of it unless you find some real synergies between the two and exploit those. Even crossover influence between different kinds of writing is hard to achieve. Publishers of fiction don’t care much if you are doing well in some non-fiction field (unless it relates directly to the story you’re submitting – you know, like the detective used his extensive knowledge of photography to solve the crime.)

I had some success as a non-fiction writer a long time ago. I published three children’s science books, over a hundred technical articles for magazines, contributed to well-known encyclopedias, produced several sets of educational wallcharts, etc., etc. (all for big-name publishers like Macmillan and Hachette.) However, none of that counted at all when it came to submitting fiction. The novels were judged on their own merit, not on mine – which is not a bad thing.

Let’s face it, publishers can’t stay in business without writers. They might manage without paper and ink (by going digital), but without content there is nothing to publish.

I think you are right about writers’ collective role in this dynamic – except I would express it as “we get the publishers we expect”.