Quote:
Originally Posted by MartinC
Traditional publishers have another function besides making their shareholders rich. When a publisher (I mean of course a "real" one) offers you a contract he is saying I value your work enough to invest in it. This is an objective confirmation of the quality of your work which is entirely missing from the self-publishing model. Something of the sort is very necessary, and it's hard to see where it's going to come from if you puiblish directly.
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Why is it necessary? From the publisher's perspective, they're not saying, "I value your work enough to invest in it." What they're
really saying is, "We believe your work will sell enough to justify the cost of a printing run of size X, which you would never be able to afford on your own."
Traditional publishers do provide copy editing, typesetting, and marketing that the average author can't or doesn't want to do himself, and those have value. But the perceived value of, "This company thinks this author's work is good," is unimportant. Reviews, word of mouth, etc will very quickly separate the wheat from the unedited, typo-ridden chaff.