Quote:
Originally Posted by amoroso
Can you elaborate on what you mean by small publisher, and what genres you refer to? From what I have heard in Italy, nonfiction authors typically get a $500-$1.000 advance from medium-small publishers, and consider themselves lucky. Good print runs are usually around 1,000 copies or more.
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I don't know anything about the Italian market. However it's my understanding that in the US, a 1000-copy print run is fairly small. The US market is also huge -- iirc it's about 25% of world book revenues, and last I checked the US had a bigger population than Italy.
I also don't know any formal definitions of "small" "medium" or "large" publishing firms, though you could make such splits by revenues or by number of employees.
"Genre publishers" specialize in books that have a fairly predictable subject matter and a specific audience: Sci-fi, romance, mystery to name a few. As such, the books they put out are practically commodities.
The biggest example is Harlequin, which is a massive romance publisher and one of the most profitable publishers in the world. They receive tons of submissions from their own audience, and few of their authors truly stand out and drive sales. As a result, they don't need to pay big advances or high royalties to the overwhelming majority of their authors.