Quote:
Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward
This is what an engineer would call "a self defeating critera". Stop and look at this from an author's situation. If I'm self publishing and are getting 20,000+ sales a year, I ought to be getting at least a couple bucks a book. That's $40,000 a year.
At 50,000+ a year, that's $100,000 a year. At that point, why do I need a BPH?
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• Publishers soak up a lot of the expenses, including editing, legal, and marketing costs.
• Publisher will almost certainly promise bigger distribution and thus bigger sales. E.g. if they can sell 50k self-published books, the publisher will likely say "work with us and you can sell millions." (And in at least some cases, they'll be right.)
• Publishers offer advances, and fairly large ones these days. And yes, I'd say that someone dumping $100k in your lap every year or two, plus intermittent payments, is both enticing and alters your schedule.
• The author may want to work with a specific editor, or a higher caliber of editor than one they can hire as a freelancer.
• Self-publishers, at this time, have little chance of getting reviewed and zero marketing resources.
• Larger publishing houses will have the resources to translate and internationally distribute the books.
• Many authors are more interested in being a writer than in being a publisher, marketer, accountant, lawyer, and so forth.
Heck, even authors who have the presence and financial wherewithal to run the show still stick to publishers, including
James Patterson, Stephen King, Stephanie Meyer, JK Rowling and so forth.
Finally, I'm reasonably certain that whatever happens in the future, even if today's publishers go down in flames, some other big conglomerates will step in and dominate in similar ways and to similar extents. It may be retailers, it may be agents, it may be marketers, or some other type of institution. But I doubt that ebooks will usher in a golden age of Author Independence in which everything is hunky-dory and the "evil" publishers are all gone.