Thread: Now that's a business model...
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Old 12-08-2010, 08:44 PM   #69
Kali Yuga
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The idea that brains of New Yorkers are all that different than anywhere else is slightly ridiculous.

Also, don't forget that many big publishers are not based in NY (e.g. Harlequin is in Toronto; Penguin in London).

And of course, there are numerous small publishers in NYC.


Quote:
Originally Posted by Nate the great View Post
The real reason that big publishers are dropping mid list authors isn't that they're not profitable, it's that they're not profitable _enough_. Working out of NYC imposes a very high operations cost which has to be recouped.
With all due respect, that's BS.

New York is more expensive that other places. However, a publisher that relocates to Nebraska is not going to save money.

Why? Because pretty much everyone they need to do business with is also in New York. Editors, agents, marketers, lawyers, journalists and media, academics, researchers, investors, authors, they form a critical density in New York. What are they going to do, fly out 1/2 their staff every week to NY and LA? Fly an author and his/her agent to West Nowhere?

Even the most technologically advanced industries benefit from geographic proximity to industry centers, regardless of the cost of living in those areas -- Silicon Valley, SF, Austin, Virginia. Face time and networking matter, and you don't get those if you are in cheap rural areas.

A genre publisher can get out of those loops if they don't need those resources. However, that hardly makes for a model for any other publisher.


And yes, the big publishers are definitely pruning their rosters of writers who are not making money. Those authors get picked up by small publishers, many of whom have offices in -- wait for it -- New York City.

Publishers of all sizes have been in NY for decades. It's not like they suddenly moved to the Big Apple in 2003, and now it's hitting their bottom lines.

What has changed recently is that authors and agents are demanding big advances from big pubs; and the publishers are giving it to them. This raises the bar for the author's sales figures.

So if you get a $300k advance (like one author cited in the article), and you only sell 10,000 copies, unless the publisher got $30 per copy at the wholesale price you are in the red; whereas if you got a $50k advance, you'd be alright. So why would, or should, they keep you around...?
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