[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by stonetools

I think the likelihood is that the BPHs will simply cut back on expenses. Its a lot easier to save money by simplying cutting staff and by reducing advances to authors.

Much easier to save money by not publishing at all!
Considering authors an "expense" rather than "the core source of the business" is one of the issues that's gotten BPHs into their current problems.

Also you don't develop new authors ( risky and expensive)

They don't develop new authors now--they want instant blockbuster authors. Their business model doesn't fit with today's publishing world, and they're trying to change the world instead of the model.

I note that St Martin’s Press is making the same mistake with Amanda Hocking. If I didn’t follow her twitter feed, I would have had no idea that the first book in her Trylle series came out in January. In fact, the marketing is so poor on her books that I didn’t realize that the second book came out last week until I went to Amazon to double-check the spelling of Trylle.

With the public failure of Morrison’s traditional books (which got more press than the initial sale had), and the upcoming mishandling of other indie writers books, traditional publishing will soon jump off the non-existent gravy train.

and you don't greenlight expensive non-fiction projects (same).

Not without an assured customer base. If they'd stop thinking of books as produce that expires three months from the release date, they could plan for long-term sales for books that have high initial costs. Since they're assuming that all the money invested in a book needs to be made back in less than a year (even for books that take 5 years to produce)... I won't be surprised to see a lot less fact-based nonfiction on the market in the future.

Except, of course, for those funded through Kickstarter & similar programs. People who find a demand *first* and then invest money, will be on much steadier ground.

I note that every single author you cited in an earlier post was an author of genre dfiction. That alone is a telling indicator of what a non-BPH world would look like.

Or it's an indicator that a lot of us here are genre fiction fans, and we quote what we know best. Doesn't mean there aren't equal numbers of non-genre examples; we just aren't familiar with them.

Part of the reason the indie craze is so centered on genre fic, is that publishers have often shoved genre fic to the sidelines. There's never been as much of it as genre fans wanted, and it often ran out of print quickly. Now, the market is glutted with genre fic because there is immense customer demand for it--and finally, the authors have a way to fill that demand.

If there's not swarms of literary fic being released on the indie marketplace, it's because there's limited demand for it. Customers are not lining up to throw money at lit-fic authors.