With days to a new year and a big Christmas for e-book sales and devices, naturally all sorts of mainstream outlets are piling on looking for what they view as the Holy Grail of the Future of Publishing. And here’s the Los Angeles Times (for whom, I must disclose, I write for regularly as their crime fiction columnist and occasionally on other bookish topics) continuing their “Future of Reading” series with one of everybody’s favorite canards: “book publishers see their role as gatekeepers shrink.” And our old favorites — Konrath! Godin! Covey! - are invoked as leading the way to a new revolution.

That makes for shiny headlines and easy traps. Hey, I’ve fallen into that same trap, sort of. But Jason Pinter is absolutely correct when he said on Twitter Sunday night that “I want an article on epublishing to focus on an author with no platform who made it big self-pubbing. Stop regurgitating the same names.” And I think, and hope, that will be the case. But part of the issue is that media narratives prefer there to be a change from one state to another. It’s far sexier to write about Konrath and Godin leaving their print publishers behind for the world of e, or for the reverse to happen, as with the case of Boyd Morrison, who published various novels on Kindle first, did well with them, and then got picked up by a major publisher. Even if, in all of those instances, the core story subsumes seemingly incidental details that actually prove they are exceptions to rules instead of being (god, I hate this term so, so much) game-changers.

To wit: did Konrath’s relentless marketing efforts on behalf of a book published by Hyperion - not a Big Six publisher, technically, but one backed by Disney/ABC, distributed by the Murdoch-owned HarperCollins and whose books are available, widely and often, in almost all major retail outlets, online and off - aid the discovery process of his ebooks? He’d say no, but I’m on the record as thinking otherwise. (There’s also the issue of his “high six figure deal” to co-write novels for an unnamed brand name novelist, though Konrath hasn’t mentioned that in several months.) Would Boyd Morrison have gotten his deals with Touchstone if he wasn’t already agented, even before he started e-publishing? It’s hard to say, but I’m fairly positive that book deal would have required an agent at some stage or another.

Would Amazon have trumpeted an exclusive Kindle-only deal by newer e-publishing stars like Karen McQuestion and Amanda Hocking in the same way they did for Konrath, David Morrell, and of course, select clients of Andrew Wylie? I doubt it. And for that matter, if a publisher does come calling to bring out future works by McQuestion and Hocking, would they say no because they’re earning plenty of money on their own? I don’t think that answer would automatically be in the negative, especially if the pot was sufficiently sweetened.

Playing the either/or game is dangerous and misses the point of the whole discussion. So let’s repeat some more platitudes: e-books taking 10% of total trade market share is still 90% accounted for by print. E-publishing, at least for now, favors writers who generate or have generated a sizable backlist, ergo favoring genre fiction.

But would a book like Kathryn Stockett’s THE HELP have sold a million-plus copies had it solely been published through e-tailers? Or, looking to non-fiction, Rebecca Skloot’s THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS, which took 10 years, several publishers and a couple of agents to bring to publishing life? In 5, 10, 20 years, perhaps the answer would be yes. Right now, and certainly through 2011, it would not. And until the seismic event of a serious brand name - James Patterson, Nora Roberts, Stephen King - disconnecting from a Big Sixer occurs, we’re nowhere near to the switch-flipping the common media narrative would love to see happen, earnestly or cynically.