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Originally Posted by sirmaru
Why does an eBook consumer need an old time publisher anyway? What do they do to earn their money?
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I can't reconcile this with the following you wrote two days ago:
I only read history and biography books and am willing to pay the price.
As to what the publisher does for history and biography, they first approve the book proposal. People don't usually just write those kinds of books without such encouragement. And authors can't usually afford to complete the research without an advance or a grant. Grants are fine, but the best history and biography I read usually comes from commercial publishers that offer advances.
Then the publisher works with the author or authors to make the book better. These is from the acknowledgements of a book I finished yesterday,
The Siege: 68 Hours Inside the Taj Hotel:
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Thanks to our army of editors at Penguin for marshalling and honing down the manuscript across three continents and through its multiple forms: Joel Rickett in London, Chiki Sarkar in New Delhi and Emily Baker in New York. Thanks also to our copy-editor, Mark Handsley, for his painstaking rereading of the manuscript.
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Maybe someone will say that one great editor is better than an army. Could be. Most publisher thank-yous I read are a lot more effusive!
Hachette isn't a big history and biography publisher, at least in English. Then, neither is, as a publisher, Amazon.
If your model book is written by a lonely author creating pure works of imagination in a garret, indie will be fine. But for the kind of books I most often read, the infrastructure of a publisher is generally needed.