[stonetools]

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."

(shrug) Call' em "investors" if you dont like" venture capitalist" .What matters is that publishers perform the important role of getting to market books that wouldn't get to market without substantial initial investment-books that educate people about important issues past and present . And a well-educated citizenry is essential to the existence of a free state.

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.

Do you have any statistics to support the claim that BPHs do in fact make money in the long run on such books? In real life these books are seen as losses by publishers and investors alike and thats what counts.

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.

Publishers like everyone else who produces for the market can't predict the future. If you have some kind of strategy for predicting what books will be popular next year, please share it.
Publishers are like major league hitters. They put out the best product they can and hope to get a hit .300 of the time. Its the nature of the business-not a defect in their business strategy.

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).

That's six names. Count that against the hundreds (if not thousands) of names of authors developed by BPHs. Thanks for making my point. Note all are genre fiction writers- and not the top rank either.

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.

Or to go in debt faster. Another downside, as Charles Stross points out, is that writers who are marketing, editing, proof-reading, looking for cover art, etc, are writers who aren't writing. CS says that he could be a pretty good self-pubber if he had to be, but he would be writing only half as many books.
Look, its great that the self-publishing route is now a robust option alongside the traditional publishing. But the INTERNET!!! didn't abolish such economic truths as division of labor, comparative advantage, and economies of scale . It only made it easier to publish and distribute digital media-and unfortunately, easier to rip off media content creators .