On June 29, I attended an editor’s round table discussion on the future of academic publishing hosted by Elsevier at their headquarters in London. Although the emphasis was on issues regarding scientific journals, some of the same issues face the publishing industry in general and the thriller industry in particular.

Scientific Journals

Publishing original research in a scientific journal can generally be summarized as follows. A researcher or group of researchers find something they want to study. They conduct their experiments and analyze their results. They write their paper and send it to a journal. The editor of the journal decides if the paper corresponds to the scope of the journal and, if it does, the editor sends it out to be refereed. If it does not, the paper is desk rejected. The referees read the paper and decide whether or not the paper is worthy of being published in the journal. The editor makes the final decision based on the referee recommendation.

The process is extremely demanding and time consuming. It is also frustrating for the authors. It can take many months, even years (one of my papers was in the journal review process for four years before being accepted for publication). While it is with one journal, it cannot be under consideration with another journal.

It is important to note that the work of the researchers, editors and referees is mostly pro bono. The institutions, usually universities and not the publishers, pay the salaries. The publisher, Elsevier in the present case, turns the accepted papers into reputable journals and journal volumes that they market, often back to the same institutions that financed the original research. If the reviewers are paid anything, it is never enough to cover the time it takes to do a professional review job.

Herein lies the problem. The volume of research output is growing faster than the supply of reviewers to review it and the capacity of publishers to publish it. Consequently, the quality of reviews is falling precipitously and many papers are rejected on highly dubious grounds. This problem, the problem of invalid reviews, is a major subject of conversation at any academic conference in business and finance.

The world wide web and the internet have opened access to tools and data that only a few years ago were privy to the richest universities. As a result, research output has exploded. Electronic publishing has seriously reduced the costs of producing a journal. Many new, electronic journals have sprung up, including some by the traditional publishers themselves. They are often pay to publish journals and, as such, lack credibility. But, many do not. There are also a growing number of reputable platforms where researchers can publish their work without going through a rigorous referee process. All this is muddying the waters and putting the publishers on the defensive.

Publishing Thrillers

This brings me to the novel publishing industry. In this paradigm, the authors are the researchers. The agents play the role of referee. They are the gatekeepers for the publishers who rely on them to bring in quality merchandise. But the publishers don’t pay these gatekeepers, who rely on their cut of the author’s deal to generate income. Rightly or wrongly, many authors feel that the overall quality of the gatekeepers is pretty low. So, then the game becomes one of finding the right person to review the manuscript. In the academic paradigm, the reviewers are confirmed researchers themselves and knowledgeable in the field they cover. It is the journal that assigns them. However, in the novel writing industry, this is not the rule.

To overcome this problem, there are all kinds of advice out there on how to choose the right agent, how to pitch the agent, etc. It sounds good in theory, but is very difficult to apply practically. At the end of the day, authors do not have enough information to make an informed choice of an agent. Agents get swamped by floods of books that they just do not have the time to review.

The result is similar to what is happening in academia with open access journals. Electronic publishing has made it cheap and easy for authors to self-publish. The stigma of the vanity press syndrome is disappearing as sales of independently published novels surpasses those of the traditional publishers. The problem is that the quality varies so much that it is hard for potential readers to decide what they want to take a chance on.

In the discussions we had last week, there were strong arguments for using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to overcome the referee problem. We are exploring ways to apply AI to the review process as a way to speed up the process and make it possible to review many more papers. I am wondering if there might be scope for AI to help agents identify best sellers.