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Originally Posted by nwhitfield
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.
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Yes, very few writers do make enough to live on, but cutting out publishers would hurt the majority of them far more than it would help. Getting 10% of cover on a hundred sales is much better than 100% of cover on one sale.
When you factor in the loss of time for all the other tasks they have to do without a publisher, and the additional difficulties they face with marketing that commercially published authors don't, it's easy to see why cutting out publishers won't help authors.
The (fiction) authors who do best with self-publishing, especially self-publishing ebooks, are those who are already commercially published who use self-publishing to bring their out of print backlist to their existing fanbase. Remember, the biggest draw for any book is that the reader liked another by the same author, so having even one book currently available in the trade is a huge advantage.
Also, (and this is a general comment) before complaining about authors getting 10%, it's important to remember that in print books the publisher only gets 45% at most, and the author's 10% comes out of that.