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Originally Posted by conan50
I have frequently thought: What if a book only has 10,000 readers, or 5,000, or even just 1,000 readers who alone in the world want/need that particular book? Who will publish it? No traditional publisher would touch it. And that is why, to that particular author, Amazon is needed and Hachette is not.
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1. It's true that Amazon created a marketplace where self-publishing is more viable than in the past. But that was then. By pressuring indie competitors like Hachette to lower prices, Amazon will, if successful, reduce indie sales.
2. In 2006, before the Kindle and Nook, the average book published in the US
sold 500 copies. As implied by my link, even some major publisher books sell under 1,000 copies. Of course, the publisher was hoping to sell more. But except with a name brand author, you can't know, in advance, that sales will be substantial. This goes for indie just as for Hachette. Now, there are some specialized academic titles -- says, ones addressed to experts in an particular area of mathematics -- that couldn't possibly be bestsellers. Still, there are thousands of substantial college and university libraries, and the hope is at least that most of them will want the book. But, often, they don't. Publishing is, by its nature, risky. The most important social function of publishers, other than manuscript improvement, is to take some of that risk away from authors by paying an advance for a book that may not sell.
3. There is one genre of book where your link is truly applicable: Poetry. That's because, AFAIK, poets turn in finished work. For most other types of books, the importance of the publisher to the reader is the editing. Your link author seems to think that the author turns over a finished manuscript. But often the publisher buys a book on the basis of a proposal and a first chapter, helping the author to craft the remainder. Or the author turns in a manuscript that he or she thinks is almost perfect, but is far from it. This is from one of the comments in your link:
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My editor went over every sentence in the book and helped me craft it and change things that needed to be changed. My copy editor helped correct problems in the text -- like changing "silicone" to "silicon" -- and made sure I got facts right. The art editor commissioned a great cover and designed the inside of the book. I'd go back and forth from the house in Brooklyn where I lived with my parents to the publisher's office on Union Square in Manhattan and to my editor's apartment on weekends. Publishers are not just middlemen; they are partners, fellow creators in bringing out a book.
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Hachette may not always give this much help. Perhaps they should do it more often. But when, as often, it is needed, I think the chances of the author self-funding (or crowd-sourcing) it are low, both for financial reasons and due to author ego considerations. And the more Amazon squeezes Hachette, the less likely Hachette is to maintain a cost structure allowing them to turn mediocre books into good ones, and good ones into great ones.
Of course, some manuscripts only need moderate editing and/or are written by authors who can afford to pay for substantial editing. These will work, from a reader standpoint, fine with self-publishing. There is a place for multiple publishing models.