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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.
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The reality of course is that picking winners is rather like hitting in the major leagues: you take the best cut you can and hope to make a hit .300 of the time. Unlike in baseball, the fans never see the misses so they assume its easy to predict the hits.
An exercise for such people is whether they predicted the success of
Seabiscuit or
Twilight ahead of time. My guess is 0.00 per cent of Mobile Readers predicted the success of these bestsellers when they first came out. Ken Auletta ( who actually in the business and knows whereof he speaks)
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Good publishers find and cultivate writers, some of whom do not initially have much commercial promise. They also give advances on royalties, without which most writers of nonfiction could not afford to research new books. The industry produces more than a hundred thousand books a year, seventy per cent of which will not earn back the money that their authors have been advanced; aside from returns, royalty advances are by far publishers’ biggest expense. Although critics argue that traditional book publishing takes too much money from authors, in reality the profits earned by the relatively small percentage of authors whose books make money essentially go to subsidizing less commercially successful writers. The system is inefficient, but it supports a class of professional writers, which might not otherwise exist.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2...#ixzz1shKfeqah
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