Quote:
Originally Posted by Fbone
And no capital is another cause of failure. In other words, not realizing you shouldn't have started the business in the first place.
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In which case you don't have anything worth acquiring.
So the scenario has no bearing on the big or small publisher debate.
There's lots of ways to fail; few to succeed. And growing really really big is not likely to be a road to "success" for much longer. Carpet-bombing the market with random titles hoping for one big instant success is a dying strategy; the "instant success" payouts are getting smaller as the definition of what a Bestseller is eroding away.
The logic behind the wave of BPH consolidation mergers being proposed isn't about working capital or producing more new titles anymore, it is about reducing overhead: reducing staff and fixed costs and increasing the number of titles in catalog via merger. It's about the backlist, not about new titles.
That's why the Authors Guild is suddenly concerned about the big boys getting bigger.
The newly emergent Giant Publishing Houses are not looking to be producing more new titles than their precursors combined (or even as many) but less. What they *are* looking to do is what the music studios did during the transition to CD and the Movie studios did during the transition to DVD: flood the market with the backlist. Grow revenue while shrinking the staff size and capital requirements.
That should work long enough for the golden parachutes to vest. And maybe a bit longer.