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Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
What's this percent business? Most big publisher authors get a fixed amount from the advance.
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Then a royalty percentage after the advance is recouped.
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I think that if we consider Amazon Publishing and Kindle Direct Publishing as an entity under the same corporate umbrella, Amazon may be considered the sixth big publisher.
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i don't know how Amazon Publishing works, but KDP is a self publishing platform, not a publisher. You can't just call it one and then bash it for not being like one.
If I, as an author, choose to self-publish, then that's my decision. I didn't need an agent, I didn't need to shop the book around, and hope to get it past the right gate keepers at just the right time. I didn't need to take a publishing house's editorial input. I knew I would not be paying myself an advance.
KDP is a self-publishing platform, not a publisher, and there is no reason to think that all publishers will change to work like it does, any more than all fancy restaurants feel compelled to turn themselves into an automat.
And if your Chinese history author requires an advance from a BPH to do work, maybe it's time to look for a new model: grants, patrons, crowd-fundng....it's a brave new world. Maybe I, as a reader, no longer feel I should have to subsidize that Chinese history advance by paying the overhead in the cost of the books I buy. That 'risk the publishers assume' is really the money we all pay in the cover price. It's not coming out of the CEO's trust fund.