Gatekeepers and optimum curation

I've been thinking a lot lately about gatekeepers: literary agents, publishers, programme commissioners, the people who put the playlist together for national radio stations… There's a lot of them about. For the most part, that's a good thing - I want some quality control if I'm going to invest my time or money in buying a book, listening to a radio programme, watching a film. But who gets to be the gatekeeper and who do they have in mind when they're checking for quality, signs of popularity, or profit-making potential?

I happened to hear a clip on the radio recently, MeatLoaf talking about how hard it was to get any record company interested in Bat Out Of Hell. And when eventually they did get it recorded and released, only two radio stations would play anything from it. It has since sold over 50 million copies. Lots of people have heard of it, even if it's not their cup of tea. Clearly there was an appetite for that album and it must have made a vast profit, but both of those things are only obvious in hindsight. At the time it must have seemed like an insane risk, and the record companies who turned it down were making a rational decision. But was Bat Out Of Hell an out of the blue fluke that it would have been hard for anyone to predict the popularity of, or were those record company execs out of touch? I don't know, but I'll come back to this point in a minute.

Say Meat and his mate Jim decided all those men in suits knew nothing and they were going to make the album themselves, press a few hundred vinyl copies and take it from there. It would have been on a lower budget, naturally. And with a different producer, and without anyone at the helm who had experience of marketing and sleeve design and all that aspect of it. It could have strayed (further) into self-indulgence and tried the patience of its listeners. It might have been a close cousin of the Bat Out Of Hell we know, but it would be unlikely to have become quite as popular, and maybe there'd be good reason for that.

Now I happen to like Bat Out Of Hell but I'm not trying to lay out a nightmare scenario where it never existed. I would never have known I'd missed out on it. Maybe Meat and Jim would have tried again on something else, more successfully, and got to record Bat Out Of Hell as their second album anyway. It doesn't matter. What matters is that someone in charge heard what they had to offer, said 'nobody will buy that - or at least not enough of them for us to turn a profit' and turned out to be wrong. There are a few stories like that - the men who passed on The Beatles, the agents and publishers that rejected JK Rowling, the self-published authors on six-figure incomes - but they are the few who persisted, and either eventually found someone who believed in them, or did it themselves to a high enough standard that they found their own audience.

There are two aspects to this and I don't have answers to either part I'm afraid:

• There are currently gatekeepers who control whose novel gets picked up by the big publishers, whose sitcom gets on BBC1, whose album gets enough airplay to get to number one, etc. They are not always as diverse (in background, experience, location, taste or anything else) as they could be. They sometimes get it wrong despite their best efforts. They are usually looking for The Next Big Thing.

• It is easier than it has ever been to record and distribute your own music, publish your own novels, make your own radio programme (podcast). How do you find your audience? How, as a potential member of that audience, do I find decent quality output that fits my taste?

To go back for a moment to those out of touch record executives. Let's say none of them like heavy metal, none of their friends or cousins or younger brothers like heavy metal, so they're either unaware of or dismissive of the vast, global appeal of heavy metal. They hear something that sounds a bit metal and they say 'nobody likes metal, we can't sell it' so they don't pick it up. You could argue that if you were a metal band you wouldn't want to be picked up by a record company where they don't like metal, but if all the big record companies have that attitude you're a bit stuck if you want to hit the big time. Now extrapolate that to any taste or viewpoint in your field that might not appeal to the few gatekeepers, whether it's novels with working-class main characters, British Asian sitcoms, or overblown rock opera. You see the potential problems?

This year I'm working my way through a course called Writing Your Sitcom by James Cary. He wrote or co-wrote several BBC radio comedies I particularly enjoyed, though he mainly focuses on TV in the course as it's only the odd weirdo like me apparently who prefers radio. However, we were recently talking about why and how to self-produce a sitcom. The how is relatively simple for radio, I know the technical ins and outs of recording and editing audio and I have a decent microphone due to recording some of my stories (which you can find here on chirbit). I've been to a Script Yorkshire workshop on how to produce your own podcast so I'm aware of how to distribute it. If I can keep the number of characters down to the number of friends I have with time on their hands and enough acting ability to help me out, I can make it for next to no money - though it would cost me in time, effort, and biscuits. But how do I know if it's any good? Then assuming it is ok, and I'm not entirely deluded about my own script-writing ability, how do I persuade other people to listen to it when it hasn't been through any gatekeepers?

As to the why, there are several reasons why you might want to go your own way, but for me the main one comes back to that search for The Next Big Thing. If you're a BBC radio bod you've only got a few slots and although it's relatively cheap to make a radio sitcom you want to get a decent audience. You need mass appeal, not niche interest. Podcasts of course are the opposite. If you know your sitcom about cosplayers is full of in-jokes that other cosplayers will find hilarious but nobody else will get, then it's pointless trying to persuade the BBC to give you half an hour a week on Radio 4, but if you can make a good enough podcast it makes perfect sense to appeal directly to a few thousand cosplayers who like comedy. Similarly with your flash fiction collection about British cheese, your album of bagpipe covers of Iron Maiden songs, your novel which is genuinely funny for anyone who's ever programmed in Fortran but impenetrable to anyone else…

It is just possible that I'm over-thinking this. That not everything has to be the best it could possibly be, and the low-fi Bat Out Of Hell on limited-pressing vinyl would still have been a good album. After all, I write this blog with no quality control (except OneMonkey occasionally reading a draft post). In the Before Times I stood up at open mics or sat in a radio studio in Seacroft and read unpublished stories that I thought were good enough to share. I've self-published graphic novels, story collections, and a novel. I've had enough confidence in my own ability to do all this but always, I suppose, with the nagging feeling that my confidence might be misplaced. Perhaps what I'm looking for is a network of people who have varied enough tastes and background to really get a wide variety of things, and to be able to say that while that bagpipe album is the pinnacle of its kind, the cosplay sitcom needs more work.

If I’ve got you thinking, you can always buy me a cuppa…