{"id":1095,"date":"2026-04-06T10:47:33","date_gmt":"2026-04-06T10:47:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/posse.keithlewiskeithlewis.com\/?p=1095"},"modified":"2026-04-06T10:47:33","modified_gmt":"2026-04-06T10:47:33","slug":"shy-girl-is-a-window-into-the-future-kenneth-whyte-shush","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/posse.keithlewiskeithlewis.com\/index.php\/2026\/04\/06\/shy-girl-is-a-window-into-the-future-kenneth-whyte-shush\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cShy Girl is a window into the future\u201d &#8211; Kenneth Whyte (Shush)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>\u201cbig publishing houses are generating hits by trawling self-published offerings on Amazon and scooping up anything with sales momentum. They are ever so slightly moving away from being reliable curators of fine writing and great storytelling to acting as distribution outlets for whatever is hot, because it\u2019s hot. To borrow a term that was popular in the telecom world I briefly inhabited, publishers are edging toward becoming dumb pipes, carrying data across a network without adding any value or control over it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I don\u2019t want to overstate this, because much of what is being published is being published as ever it was, but there\u2019s definite movement in the dumb pipe direction. The big houses are increasingly relying on upstream signals\u2014whether Amazon rankings or TikTok virality or Goodreads buzz\u2014rather than editorial conviction in their acquisitions\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/shush.substack.com\/p\/shy-girl-is-a-window-to-the-future\">https:\/\/shush.substack.com\/p\/shy-girl-is-a-window-to-the-future<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cbig publishing houses are generating hits by trawling self-published offerings on Amazon and scooping up anything with sales momentum. They are ever so slightly moving away from being reliable curators of fine writing and great storytelling to acting as distribution outlets for whatever is hot, because it\u2019s hot. To borrow a term that was popular&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"webmentions_disabled":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[5,3,4,65],"class_list":["post-1095","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-links_read","tag-extract","tag-linksread","tag-mastodon","tag-rss_source"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/posse.keithlewiskeithlewis.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1095","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/posse.keithlewiskeithlewis.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/posse.keithlewiskeithlewis.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/posse.keithlewiskeithlewis.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/posse.keithlewiskeithlewis.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1095"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/posse.keithlewiskeithlewis.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1095\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1096,"href":"https:\/\/posse.keithlewiskeithlewis.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1095\/revisions\/1096"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/posse.keithlewiskeithlewis.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/posse.keithlewiskeithlewis.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/posse.keithlewiskeithlewis.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}