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Originally Posted by DiapDealer
That is indeed what I meant.
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I have no desire to see the entire tradpub industry fail utterly. They just need to get over seeing themselves (and presenting themselves) as the "bastion of literature." The sooner they learn to share the stage (and more of the proceeds--in the form of royalties--with their authors), the sooner we can put this battle behind us. There's enough pie for authors, publishers, and editors (and any and all hybrid combinations of those roles in one or more entities) to go around.
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Two comments. Quite a few of those NYC publishers/editors/et al that some look at with disdain, do what they do as a labor of love. Sure the big mother ship publishing house has a decent profit margin (though not nearly what some thing to think), but that tends to go to the suits, most of whom have very little to do with the day to day publishing business. Most of the front line people who actually deal with the authors, the editors, the people making the decision which books to push and which ones to reject, don't make much money. Many here seem to confuse the suits over in Europe with the people doing the actual work.
Second, people seem to keep glossing over the basic business model of the publishing world. Very few books each year earn out their advance. For every J.K. Rowlings selling millions and millions of copies, there are hundreds of books that sell perhaps 10,000 if they do well, and many more that sale only a few thousand copies. The cut that the publishing company takes from the best sellers basically subsidizes all those books that never really take off. This is true even for the very small publishers. If you take a small publishing house such as Baen Books, the best selling authors such as David Weber allow them to continue to republish old Heinlein books and take chances on new authors, some of whom do fairly well, others who never pan out. Taking that model away will leave you with a system that quickly falls apart as new authors are never developed.
Over the past 30 years, we have seen the publishers merging and being bought out, leaving only a few very large publishing companies. To a great extent, this was because of changes to the tax laws and economy of scale. It is my guess as the need for physical inventory goes away and as the cost of physical presses goes down, we will see the publishing industry start to fragment back into the much smaller units that we use to have, much like the indie record labels have sprung up all over the place.