Quote:
Originally Posted by gweeks
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Yes. Lawrence Block, for one, was published by a Unit of Hachette, not a dinky outfit. Barry Eisler used to be published by Penguin. Most of the others she has quoted from time to time are also talking about BPHs rather than small publishers..
The BPH horror stories at Teleread, KKR, and other publishing sites are recurring and long-standing; typically they are about late/missing payments, failure to return contacts (from author or agent), dodgy accounting (lots and lots of those), rights grabs, attempts to sneak contract mods by bypassing the agent, orphaned books, etc.
For most authors, life in the grasp of a BPH may be somewhat different that under a fading small publisher but the pain is no less.
It takes a lot for an established bestselling author to issue such a sweeping statement as Blocks, but things really are *that* bad for the 99% of authors ot named Turow or Patterson or Snooki. The BPHs are simply set up to handle blockbuster-volume sellers and most anything else is becoming beneath their dignity...except when it comes time to claim a 1972 contract entitles them to ebook rights.
Last I heard, about two years ago, most BPHs were dropping authors who were still racking up 30K units worth of sales because apparently their overhead doesn't let them make a profit at those volumes. (On the other hand, that same author, by going indie can rake in over $100K net off those same unit sales at half the BPH price.)
Its simple economics: BPHs grew big to be able to afford the big advances needed to capture high-volume, highprofile titles in an environment of 200-300K new titles per year. Now that we are seeing ten times that much because of the backlist and indies, the volume of sales is going down and so is the *number* of new releases supporting the corporate overhead, so the new normal doesn't support the typical BPH overhead unless your name is Patterson or Turow.
As Naughton pointed out, her books were selling fine, volume-wise, but now real income was filtering through the BPH filter into her pocketbook. Once she removed the clogged filter she was able to capture real value from her work.
All indications are the BPHs need to streamline their business and reduce their overhead to be able to operate at lower print run levels--but what they seem to be doing is doubling down on gigantism through mergers and focusing more than ever on high volume titles.
(shrug)
Interesting experiment, that.