In case you haven’t heard, indie publishing is cheapening literature. As the claim goes, the proliferation of self-published work and the lowering of the bar for what gets published create a cacophony of noise that threatens to drown out good books and their authors. This will drive down the quality of all published books, suppress the power of the written word, and result in the end of civilization as we know it.

Well, OK, that last bit is mine, but you get it: too much of the indie thing dooms literature. Do you buy these claims? Do they hold water? Is it necessarily true that more works of fiction and non-fiction drive down overall quality?

Since I have an engineering background, the mere mention of “noise” encourages me to envision this matter in terms of noise floor vs. signal strength. Wait, wait! Don’t go clicking back to Twitter or Facebook or YouTube. I promise this won’t make your head hurt.

Still with me? OK, good.

In my analogy, “noise floor” stands for that alleged drowning effect the overall increase of book titles causes. For the sake of argument (and OK, but because it tends to be true in general though not in many notable instances), let’s also assume this “noise” constitutes work of inferior quality. You know the indie stigma: poorly edited, lots of typos, Mickey Mouse book covers, poor textual formatting, bad plotting, thin characterization, wooden dialog, and so on. “Signal” here stands for that book seeking to be noticed, and “signal strength” for its ability to stand above the noise floor.

Now think of you as a prospective reader. How will you find the worthy books, i.e., those with a “strong signal,” when you have to wade through all the chaff? If you’re an author, whether independent or otherwise, how will your book rise above all that noise?

Let’s see how signal processing theory helps us answer these questions.

The following two graphs show what I mean. The first one we’ll title “Before Indie,” or to be more precise, before all these crazy flash in the pan authors spewed all their dribbling books through various distribution channels (if your sarcasm meter failed to catch that, please have it recalibrated). Back then, when the world was right, the noise floor, signified here by that nasty string of red dots, was much lower. That meant those green bars, i.e., those alleged great books, did not succumb to noise during those utopian days of old.

Before Indie publishing ruined everything

Ah, but those days of old are long gone, and now those crazy indie authors are running amok, driving up that noise floor and making it harder for the good books to poke through. But if you look closer, you will notice something interesting. Those books with strong signal strength still rise above, but… Oh, oh. The weak books are the ones getting drowned!?

After Indie publishing re-established the dark ages

Hmm. This deserves some deliberate head-scratching. Could this mean that in order to rise above the noise floor in this crazy indie era, we need better books? If so, won’t that incentivize authors to improve their work so that it does indeed differentiate favorably from all the chaff? Could it be that those who’ve been putting down indie publishing have done so out of concern for lesser quality work of theirs getting drowned out? And what does all this do to that claim that lesser quality is the inevitable result of an avalanche of new titles from authors who would not have gotten through the traditional publishing gate keepers?

Food for thought, no?

While you ponder all this, I must get back to my raise-the-noise-floor indie writing, some of which you can see at my Amazon and Smashwords pages.