Thread: DOJ suing Apple over ebooks.
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Old 04-21-2012, 01:12 PM   #628
rhadin
Literacy = Understanding
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Quote:
Originally Posted by kennyc View Post
They lose money because of stupid decisions and bad bets. It's their own fault.
I guess someone must know the formula for identifying only winning authors before their books are published. If someone does, they could make a fortune as a consultant. Alas, for most of us it is hard to be certain that next year's reading trend will be dwarves who squeeze pimples rather than vampires who suck blood.

I admit publishers are fools for paying authors any money as an advance, but the even bigger fools are the authors who choose to accept the advance payment and sign a contract. I don't recall ever seeing or reading about an author being forced to accept an advance from a publisher and sign a contract at gunpoint, although I wouldn't doubt making that permissible is next on the NRA's agenda.

I suppose in the ideal world, they way it would work is that publishers would give every author a huge advance but not require them to sign a contract because the authors could be trusted to use that advance to hire their own editors and designers and publicists and marketers and arrange all the book tours and signings and make sure that every distributor has sufficient copies and negotiates with the printer and arranges for warehousing, etc., and then when they make it big, they would voluntarily pay the publisher back for its generosity, with a bit of interest, so the circle isn't broken.

How foolish of me to think in terms of pbooks and ebooks. The smart author wouldn't bother making a pbook available because the ebook market is, at 20% of book sales, domineering. And the truly smart author would not only not make pbooks available, except possibly as very expensive POD books, but would sign an exclusive contract with a retailer like Amazon so that their book is available only to a portion of the ebook market and is not available in libraries either.

Yes, you have convinced me. Publishers deserve 100% of the blame for all the ills in the publishing world and for keeping authors from becoming the new Dan Browns.
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