Quote:
Originally Posted by BeccaPrice
Quote:
this is the stupidest argument! no one says to themselves "well, my Great Novel won't sell for $35 a copy if I write it, so I'm not going to bother."
|
You misunderstand the argument. Mr. Shatzkin is talking about the Great Nonfiction Book, Not the Great American Novel. Some books can't be written without considerable expenditure of resources-resources that are paid for by the publisher's advance. It's the one thing to sit in your basement and pound out stuff like " She clutched her vampire lover to her heaving bosom", etc. It's another to do a book on the rise of China as an industrial power, the influence of corporate money in the US political system, or the impact of eBooks on the book industry worldwide. For this, you need investigation in the field, interviews, and travel expenses.
The way you do it is that you pitch your book to the publisher, the publisher assumes the risk by advancing you the money to do the research and keep you alive while writing the book, then you write the book. That's how many nonfiction books are written. Indeed, many FICTION books are written this way. Mario Puzo didn't write "the Godfather" only out of his head: He did research and interviewed people who were in the Mafia.
Bottom-line, whether some books are written or not will depend on whether publishers will be able to fund the writing of the books through advances. And the less money publishers have , the more reluctant they will be to risk it on long shots like "Seabiscuit "