Quote:
Originally Posted by darryl
Of course there is. At this time these name authors have established a following with the help of the traditional publishers. This will later change. I will usually wait for the price to come down, or borrow it from the library. Some people no doubt simply pirate it. The traditional model was that Publishers would be inundated with manuscripts and would pick a few of them to publish, not of course on the basis of quality but on the basis of how many they thought they could sell. Anecdotes abound of publishers rejecting books which later proved to be very succesful, even household names. Publishers acted as "gatekeepers", sometimes not very good ones. That model is dying, and there is a cost to it. Instead of being force fed a diet of publisher selected content, we float on a veritable ocean of essentially self-published authors. There is much rubbish to sort through, but also many gems. And new means of discovering those gems are emerging all the time. And many of these new authors will become the new name authors. I would have thought that the BPH would have sought to hang on to this gatekeeper role, but I can't see them doing it at $14.99 for a MMPB.
To me, a new release by a name author is worth $9.99. If I see a book by a new author with a similar theme or which I might like, I am not prepared to pay $9.99. I might only be prepared to pay $1.99, or $3.99 or $6.99, depending on the circumstances. Sometimes, if I like the theme, I may even be tempted by a giveaway. If I really like the book and the author's future work I may reach the point where I will pay $9.99.
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Good publishers publish books that they think will appeal to their customers. Many publishers are fairly specialized. Baen and Tor do SF, so they are probably going to reject a mystery, no matter how good it is.
Some readers enjoy wading through the sea of drek to find those occasional gems. If you like it, great. Not my cup of tea though, and I suspect that the number of readers who are willing to do that is pretty small. I'm pretty sure there is always going to be demand for someone the filter out the drek. 10 or 15 years ago, it was widely predicted with iTunes that traditional record labels would go away and everyone would be an indy. Hasn't happened. Publishers provide a lot more services than you give them credit, both for the author and for the consumer.