Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
Authors who don't want to be editors and marketing specialists. Publishers offer editing, cover creation, distribution and advertising services. And readers who don't want to wade through the digital slushpile unaided.
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Indeed; as mentioned, those services may not perhaps be worth quite as much as the publishing companies say, but they are certainly important. And not every author has all the other skills necessary to make the book successful.
One person wrote to me following the publication of the piece on RegHardware, saying that according to the Society of Authors, only 2-6% of published authors make enough money to make a living out of their work.
Essentially, they are writing in their free time, and have a day job to pay the bills. And for those people, it's perhaps even more vital that there is someone else to take on tasks such as editing, marketing and so forth, otherwise they'll have even less time available to write.
Perhaps cutting out publishers would enable some of those people to make enough money to write full time - but I suspect it would be an incredibly small number of them.