Quote:
Originally Posted by tompe
They will never be able to do the developmental editing either since they are not forced to listen to the editor that they are paying themselves.
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Some authors are quite capable of taking editorial advice from someone they're paying.
None of them are able to call media attention the way Macmillan or Random House can. Maybe Rowling or King... but maybe not. I have doubts that either of them could pull as much media attention as Doctorow if they didn't have their publishers' support.
I don't mean that all or even most would-be authors can do all their own support work as well as publishers can--just that, among those who *can* do their own support work, there's at least one aspect of it that they can't do as well as a skilled large company with resources.
Of course, for that to matter, the large company needs to *use* its resources, and apply them with skill, and we're not seeing much of that. They seem to be under the impression that if they stick to the habits that made them profitable 10-50 years ago, they can ignore newfangled media changes and still be profitable. (That, or their marketing staffs are incompetent bozos who think that having a Twitter guarantees attention and sales. I'm not sure which I think is worse.)