The big bookshops are in trouble. Borders has gone. Waterstones is locked in a discounting fight to the death with the likes of Amazon and the supermarkets. Independents are faring better but have yet to engage fully in the looming battle that is digital. And the effects are felt by all of us.

With margins slashed, publishers are abandoning their midlists and focusing more and more on celebrity titles. The range of work being published is diminishing. Literary works are being squeezed out. There’s a dumbing down going on in the literary world.

Self-publishing offers authors an alternative to risk-averse mainstream publishers. But it’s not without its problems, too. For every decent book published this way, there are scores, hundreds of titles that – judged purely on literary merit – should never have seen the light of day. How does anyone find the jewels dropped into this morass of vanity?

Publishers and agents have always acted as a kind of filter. Their knowledgeable professionals not only know the market but generally have a passion for books. They weed out the rubbish – except when they can see that it might be profitable rubbish. Alas, in these difficult times for publishing, the profitable rubbish is becoming a larger proportion of what they do.

Self-publishing has no filtering mechanism of this sort. But it needn’t be that way.

WebVivant PressOn my blog at WebVivant, I’ve published a number of posts about self-publishing detailing how I think there’s a viable new web-only model made possible by Print On Demand (POD) technology. My wife, Trish, and I have created WebVivant Press as a web-based small press. Initially, the idea is to publish our own books (with three or four new titles due this year). However, we’re also considering publishing the works of other writers.

There’s an opportunity here to create a kind of book boutique – a web-based publishing and/or sales operation. The key to the book boutique would be to establish a reputation for consistent quality. Some boutiques might adopt themes or specific genres.

This sounds like a specialist bookshop, but the web-based model has some advantages. It can be run with minimal overheads and – thanks to POD technology – zero stock. I can set up a boutique simply by linking to books I like. Already, some digital publishing services make it possible to sell books through affiliate schemes. For example, my boutique might be a list of titles sold as e-books through Smashwords. Thanks to that company’s affiliate scheme, I would get a commission on each sale.

Setting up a boutique would be the work of a few minutes – just create a web page with the necessary links. But there’s more work involved to make it successful. The best, most valuable boutiques would be those that provide customers with some kind of guidance and guarantee of quality. A good boutique, then, would carry reviews and would sell only those books it recommends. If you find a boutique that matches your taste, you can shop there with confidence.

That would create a new market for those authors who have not appeared on Strictly Come Dancing, have not been involved in some life-threatening event and who can actually write. Perhaps it could be the saviour of worthwhile literature.