Quote:
Originally Posted by speakingtohe
They decide, based on experience, what the book buying public wants to buy, and generally spruce up the product, and market it.
Not saying that they decide correctly, but they must do okay or would be out of business.
The also provide capitol to publish the books and advances to authors which is essentially a gamble for them. Many books do not sell well enough to pay of the advance, and the costs of editing, printing distribution etc.
The majority of books published are still paper and few new or lesser known authors have the resources to publish and distribute paper books. If all authors went strictly to Amazon they would be depriving themselves of a pretty large market IMO.
If Amazon started publishing massive amounts of paper books, do you think they would just do print runs of everything, good or bad? Do you think they would do a better job of selecting the books they did print as paper books than the traditional publishers? Maybe they would do print on demand, but the price might be higher and the physical quality lower?
Just saying.
Helen
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Amazon Direct publishing already does that. See this link for three eBooks describing it:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_no...n%20publishing
Authors get a higher cut, pBooks are sold cheaper and printed as purchased - no 50,000 book runs, eBooks appear to get most of the sales.
Two of those publishing guide eBooks are free. Read them and see what they say. It appears this is the wave of the future. The old publishers may be going the way of the old Video Tape publishers - gone forever.