Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
When a Random House imprint picked up E. L. James, were they making an artistic judgement or a business decision?
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Uh, business decision, right?
You hit the nail on the head: traditionalists like to pretend that publishers select books on quality and artistic merit and that anything they pass over is by definition substandard.
Wrong!
Publishers pick what they *think* will *sell*. Quality is irrelevant. Artistic merit is irrelevant. They may love a book but if they think it won't sell to the masses they'll move on to the next ghost-written celebrity project from a "name" Agency. All they care is whether the book will have enough mass appeal to sell in volume and produce a big enough return on their investment to support them in the style to which they have become accustomed to.
Success or failure is defined by sales volume. They brag about it! "Bestsellers" is what they want!
Now, the thing is, there are a *lot* of people whose primary book buying criterion is popularity. They are not avid readers picking up several books a month but rather casual readers picking up a couple of books a year. Those readers make up something like 80% of book buyers and what they buy is what others like them buy. To *them* mass popularity equals quality. They buy books because "everybody else is buying it". Keeping up with the Joneses, literary edition. Novelty. Titilation. Gossip. Cheap thrills. A substitute for braodcast TV in the "slow" summer months. ("Summer reading" keeeps popping up in the rare bookstore ads, doesn't it?) Some of their buys are genuinely good books but that isn't why they buy. Some books are popular for being popular just as some celebrities are famous for... being famous.
The big publishers today are primarily purveyors of transitory mass entertainment; big today, forgotten tomorrow...until the movie adaptation comes out.
Explains a lot, doesn't it? Their ever-increasing interest in money; squeezing authors for it, raising prices, conspiring to limit competition. Bad-mouthing small and independent publishers. And of course, seeking to marginalize self-publishers. They've seen what cable has done to broadcast TV, how narrow-focus channels and content have eroded the mass appeal of the lowest-common denominator broadcast networks. And they see self-publishers doing that.
Traditionalist do understand that while the odds of one self-published title selling a million copies is near zero, the odds of a 100 self-pubbed t1tles selling 10,000 each is significant and the odds of 1000 selling a million in aggregate are practically a given. And that is a million sales that won't go to a trad-pubbed title.
That is an effect we are seeing, no?
Best sellers aren't selling as well as they used to.
Which makes me wonder just how well Grafton's latest are moving?
(Hey, *she* gratuitously brought up self-publishing into the interview! It apparently has been on her mind...)
Sadly, I smell fear.
Unnecesary fear, too.
Grafton says she has six unpublished early works from before she became a peddler of her cookie-cutter mystery series; with *her* name and brand behind them, she could self-publish them and find out how good they really are.
Let the "universe" tell her if the publishers were right or not to reject her.