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Originally Posted by LovesMacs
If trad. publishers' only goal was to educate people, they would be giving away books for free or minimal cost.
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Except for the occasional free sample, such as you'll see from the University of Chicago Press, that wouldn't work. This is because educational books take money to create.
A publisher can have a primary goal of education, as do many of the non-profits. But to achieve that, they also must help their staff and authors financially. A lot depends on their strategy for educating people, and what they see as educational.
Bertelsmann, parent of Penguin Random House, is
controlled by a nonprofit foundation with a largely educational mission. When I described them as non-profit a few months ago, a German poster responded that this is a tax dodge. I don't know enough about German tax law to say how true this is. But Random House does seem to release a lot of heavily researched nonfiction with medium to low commercial potential. The prices they charge libraries for their eBooks are high, but at least they do seem to offer, through Overdrive, every title that might be considered educational. This is more than you can say for the Ivy League non-profit publishing houses.
Quote:
Originally Posted by LovesMacs
So in effect you are arguing for less choices for readers, not more.
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After a publisher declines to market a title, it is still a choice. The author is free to print on his/her own and/or put it up on a web page.
When a commercial publisher declines to continue marketing a book because it was found to have an unusual proportion of falsehoods, while Amazon keeps on pushing it (by taking all negative customer reviews off the page, as in my last link), you can see that educational priorities vary. One publisher, in this case Simon & Schuster, has a closer-to-educational mission than does Amazon.
Am I going to read a book because it was published by Random House? No, that has nothing to do with it, at least directly. But I'm sure that Random House has a bigger educational component to its mission than does Amazon Direct Publishing.
On the OP topic, yes, having written a book makes you an author. Even if you had a ghost-writer, you are an author. This means that most of our leading politicians are authors. I base this not on right and wrong, but on how the words are used most commonly.
If you spend most of your working hours on it, you are a full-time author.
As for the phrase "professional author," it is a synonym for full-time author, with a slightly more positive connotation.
Maybe fifty years from now, usage will have changed, but right now author doesn't have anything to do with how your book is funded, edited, or distributed.