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Originally Posted by fjtorres
I would suggest: "no longer difficult to find a small but profitable audience..."
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That too--but finding an audience at all is a concern of many authors; profit is desirable but not the driving goal. They're *really* losing the authors who are just as happy with a 5000 person blog following as they would be with a few published titles under their belt. (The fact that a strong blog following easily translates to "$3 collection of this year's blog posts in an ebook" is gravy.) Some of those are
excellent writers and journalists with
great expertise in their fields, and they no longer need to seek out BPHs to get their messages to the public.
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Much like the US TV advertising business could be in the pre-cable days.
Lowest common denominator content for mass audiences. The networks would (and still do) sneer at product that is well received, avidly followed by millions, yet doesn't cover *their* high overhead and expectations.
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I loved Rusch's column on the changing face of publishing--that they're not just insisting on "profit" from the indie publishers they're snapping up, but "the difference in profit that used to exist between indie and mainstream publishing," which is no longer likely. Twenty years ago, a self/tiny-indie published author who'd sold 10,000 books would likely be an instant blockbuster if released by a BPH. Now, super-indie success isn't likely to jump tenfold when a BPH puts a logo on the spine. Certainly not if they don't give it the same attention and marketing help they give their other blockbusters.
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The BPHs are so worried about "giant" Amazon dictating to them that they are neglecting, even fostering, the development of a thousand low level competitors that are slowly eroding their domination just by taking away thousands of books they will never get to gatekeep. Or even see.
Barring change, irrelevance lies down that road.
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Absolutely. They're encouraging their own competition by pretending it can't possibly compete. And by the metric of "returns to stockholders," they're right; the indie presses and self-published books have no stockholders to feed. But by the metric of "public popularity and profits-per-title," they're in trouble.