[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by stonetools

Heh, cute. Unfortunately, in the real world, author's advances are an "expense" - the biggest expense of all, despite much snark about executive salaries and perks. The BPHS should be thought of as venture capitalists who "bet" on various authors and projects and share the risk with them by advancing them money and resources (editing services, etc) against future profits ( royalties).

Why would thinking of them as venture capitalists make anyone more in favor of them? Most of my experiences with venture capitalists are "organizations that see a chance for profit, throw money like crazy at a project, and abandon it if it doesn't churn out high revenue in the markets they've decided should be paying for it."

Most of the times these bets lose money, sometimes they pay off ( mid-list authors like Charles Stross) and sometimes they pay off big ( Laura Hillebrand, Stephen King). most of the time you never hear about the losses (7 out of 10 of all books).

Do you have any statistics that support the claim that BPHs lose money on 7 out of 10 books they publish? I could believe "7 out of 10 don't earn out on the advance," but the publisher doesn't automatically lose money on those--earning back a $10k advance doesn't take $100k in sales. When they've sold enough books to cover $10k + editorial costs + printing costs (which we're assured are a VERY TINY FRACTION of the list price), they've made a profit.

Essentially, consumers are bitching about the pricing of the winners while not even considering the expenses of the losers, which the BPHS have to eat.

If they can't be bothered to research which books have a large enough contingent of potential customers, they deserve to eat those losses. I'm not particularly sympathetic to the idea that I should pay more so that books nobody wants to read will get published. If there *is* a market for those books, but it's smaller... production should be pulled back to that size. If it's not economically feasible to print (or ebookize) the book at that market size... it doesn't get produced.

This is pretty much how every other market in existence works.

While it's difficult for a large organization to be nimble enough to track viability for every title... it's certainly easier to do so now than it was 10 years ago. They could discover which academic topics will support expensive nonfic books. They could see what fiction topics are trending. They could connect with book clubs and online reviewers and pre-establish a market for specific titles or whole themes. ("Urban fantasy with awesome women warriors" could get a huge following.)

Almost every living author that you've ever heard of was introduced to the public through the BPHs- including one JA Konrath ( quiet as its kept).

John Locke. Amanda Hocking. Boyd Morrison. E L James. Selena Kitt. Rich Burlew (webcomic artist who raised over $1 million on Kickstarter to self-publish a print volume).

The fact that most authors who make enough by writing to quit their day jobs went through the BPHs as little as 5 years ago doesn't mean that's going to be the majority truth in the future. Right now, most of the authors most of us know have gone through the BPHs--because 10 years ago, that was the only game in town, except for tiny fringe markets and techno-geeks with stars in their eyes.

No more, though; beginning authors have a choice whether to seek a BPH or self-publish--and any objective view of the merits of each says that neither is "better" for an author's career. However, self-publishing has the opportunity for more money faster.

As to the new business model, it seems to be based on the idea that the author should take all the risk, do all the work, and price the product at a fraction of the price of books put out by the BPHs- all in search of a market- ebook only - that is still a fraction of the total book market. Not surprisingly, most new authors still prefer to pursue the " old business model" whenever they have a choice.

Yes, the self-publish route costs more up-front from the author. However, openings with BPHs are limited; there certainly aren't *more* available slots than there were 10 years ago. Plenty of BPH authors have said that the midlist is being killed off.

Those authors have a choice of "self-publish or don't publish," not "self or BPH."

Ah, the old long-tail concept. You should understand that this is an academic hypothesis that is by no means established in practice. Glad you agree that fact-based nonfiction is likely to decline in the future.

If there's no market demand, it's going to languish.