[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by GA Russell

Actually, I have no idea who publishes my books. They all have imprints I am unfamiliar with, but that may not mean that they are indie publishers. They could be "fronts" for the big boys.

They may well be. The big boys are umbrellas covering a large number of imprints.

And the fact that you aren't familiar with the publisher's name is one of the issues affecting the industry. I suspect most folks think in terms of authors and titles. If you ask them who published the book, they'd have to pull it off the shelf to check.

Branding is critical, but not all that many are doing it. Harlequin certainly is - they're the first name you think of when Romance is the genre in question. Baen and Tor are working hard on branding, too. But all of them are more or less specialty publishers focusing on a particular genre. It gets harder when you're one of the Big 6. (Technically, Tor is one of those imprints covered by an umbrella. The umbrella in the US is Macmillan, which in turn is a unit of Holtzbrink in Germany. What do you think of when you hear Macmillan? You're probably aware of them as a publisher, but would have to Look Stuff Up to discover what they published.)

But I am unwilling to assume that they are not indies. I am unwilling to believe that I would find little that would interest me if the big publishers were to disappear. Not only are there current small publishers, but there would likely be new small companies which would start up.

Without knowing who they are, I can't guess. And you may well find stuff you'll want to read. I don't know exactly what your tastes are.

I think the underlying assumptions in a lot of these discussions is that what everyone reads is fiction. For some folks that's true. For others, it partially true if at all. I probably read as much non-fiction as fiction, and a fair bit of it will be inherently more expensive to produce, so I don't expect the sort of prices people hope for in fiction to be the norm.

As a customer/consumer, I don't believe that I have a vested interest in what the big publishers put out for the first time today. I do believe that I have an interest in their back catalogues. If the big ones were to disappear, I assume that the corporate parents would sell off the assets including the rights to publish the back catalogues. (I assume you know how I feel about copyright, so no need to get into that here.)

I understand the concern about back catalog. There's a fair bit of stuff I'd like to see brought back as ebooks.

But I don't assume that the publishers could necessarily sell off the rights to a lot of that stuff as assets, because that assumes the imprint that originally published it still has the rights. Publishing contracts generally specify that the publisher retains the rights while the books are in print. If the publisher allows the books to go out of print, the author or agent can request that the rights revert.

In the case of the stuff you're talking about, those rights probably reverted some time ago, and aren't the corporate parent's property to dispose of.

The more justifiable complaint is "Why hasn't someone picked this up and re-issued it?" There are a variety of possible reasons, including "No publisher thinks it will sell well enough", "The rights holders have an exaggerated idea of how well it will sell and want more than any sane publisher will give them for the right to re-issue", "The rights holders haven't tried to get the stuff re-issued", and "Just who owns the rights is up in the air."

The fact that Joe New Yorker loses his job doesn't bother me, because his salary is a lot higher than mine and he's never cared about me.

The fact that Joe New Yorker loses his job bothers me, because most of the folks I know and hang out with these days are in publishing in one sort or another. Joe New Yorker might just be one on my friends.

But unless you're at the top of the food chain, publishing salaries are low. I talked to a woman I know last month, whose first job was as a proofreader working for an outfit that did it on a contract basis for publishers. She applied for a job as a copywriter doing cover and interior copy for books at a publisher. They handed her a manuscript and told her to submit sample copy for the book. She read the manuscript on the train home, wrote the copy over the weekend, and dropped it off on them first thing Monday morning.

She heard nothing for 8 months, and had already decided they'd filled the position, when she got a surprise phone call telling her she had the job. When she asked why it had taken 8 months to decide she was the one, she was told they got 4,000 resumes. And when she said "Why me?", the answer was "You were the fastest one to complete the test." Everyone else took two weeks or more. She realized that they didn't need it perfect - they needed it good enough and now.

As I recall, the job paid under $20K/year. This was 20 years ago, but things haven't gotten all that much better. You don't go into publishing for the money.

The fact that Harry New York Real Estate Mogul would have to find a new tenant doesn't bother me, because he's never cared about me either.

It will bother me somewhat because I live in New York, and the economy is already down. Harry New York Real Estate Mogul may have fun finding a new tenant.

I just don't see what my downside is if the big publishers break up into tiny pieces as their assets are sold off.

Consider why all of those tiny pieces aggregated into big companies in the first place. The forces that drove the consolidation producing the Big 6 are still there, and I expect more consolidation before the dust fully settles. Breaking into tiny pieces won't save the parent or the pieces.
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Dennis