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A big part of the problem is not the people who should be making the decisions, but the bean counters upstairs who know (or think they know) money and nothing else. "The competition just sold a boy wizard books? Buy all the boy wizard books you can get!" They've become so driven by blockbusters that they're not only throwing the midlist authors under the bus, but they're insisting on buying books that will never sell, or never earn out their advance, because they "have to" have a boy wizard, a sparkly vampire, a celebrity tell-all, or whatever is hot this month. Instead of a series of good, solid sellers (see: Baen) they're shooting their bolt on hoped-for blockbusters and generally missing, to the detriment of pretty much everyone, the authors and readers most prominent among them.
There was a time when a publisher's imprint meant that a book could be expected to reach a certain standard of quality. In the past decade or so, unfortunately, it seems that it mostly means that the book reached a certain standard of similarity to other publishers' offerings. I have bought more crap with covers on it (thankfully, usually at the charity book table) than I ever have as ebooks. There are times I wonder if any editor has ever actually read a book. It fits the formula du jour, so they buy it; next month, they'll be buying something else. Instead of looking for good books to promote, they're looking for books that fit their planned promotions, whether they're good or not, and the results, a disturbing percentage of the time, come up "not". And let's not even get started on how much editing (line or copy) the books don't get anymore; I'm getting ready to start hitting someone.
So since the publishers seem to be not only abandoning but actively discarding that gatekeeper role ... what, exactly, is left for them to do?
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