Quote:
Originally Posted by stonetools
Without publishers, I don't see great works of historical biography or of investigative journalism into an industry ( like "Four Fish" ) or corrupt political institutions ( like "All the President's Men").
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As for the first example,
it seems that university presses generally don't offer advances, but still some fairly good historical/biography/etc. works get written and published. They may be a bit drier than what the general public prefers to read, but the research quality is generally there.
As for the second example, it seems that the authors of ATPM were only toying with the notion of putting it into book form
until Robert Redford contacting them about acquiring the film rights and were assembling it from newspaper articles they'd previously written and published and were presumably paid for by their regular newspaper salaries.
So, patronage of a sort, and re-using pre-existing material instead of advance paying for a new commission.
Quote:
Originally Posted by stonetools
Well, there you go. You looked for a sale and were able to buy her books at a discount. Smart shopping wins again.
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I was only able to get her e-books* "on sale" because I happen to live in a country where they happened to be not-unreasonably priced (despite the Kobo Canada list price inflation WTFery, Amazon and Sony both base their "Canadian" store pricing directly off the "US" store list prices even if it leads to discrepancies, so my 50% coupon discount was on a sell price of $7.99) and they were offered for special sale in my region and the publisher allowed further customer-applied discount.
This is not the case for anyone else not fortunate enough to live in Canada, and when e-books are offered around the world in the very same edition by a publisher who has the rights to offer them around the world, then the books should be base-priced equivalently around the world, instead of privileging one region above the rest by basically doubling the list price in the rest with no currency-exchange-rate-based cause**.
But that's really a point for the geo-restrictions thread.
* I own all her paper stuff, so getting an e-book version was only a luxury and not a priority like it might have been for a new reader who hadn't read all her work.
** While the Canadian dollar is not quite at par anymore, I still don't think it's worth less than half the US one.