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Hitch · 10-23-2014, 08:29 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by tompe

Well, working with the author to make the book better.

With all due respect to everyone involved in this discussion, on this front, I'd like to add that I spend a lot of time doing nothing but working with authors that come to me with rights-reverted books, backlist books, new direct-to-ebook series/novels, etc. Almost all of these "backlisters," as I call them, were BPH pubbed. As many of you know, we work with enormous names, famous names, less-famous names, and so on and so forth, so it's a wealth of experience.

And they will all tell you precisely the same thing: for one thing, the midlist isn't "dying," it's dead. It's died a terrible, horrible, long, drawn-out death. If you're a genre reader, particularly sci-fi and fantasy, this will be painfully noticeable to you. Why? Because the money put into midlisters just didn't earn out. Not in a big enough way to compensate for all that alleged "writer development." Now, if you are submitting to BPH's (and even imprints thereof), the questions you get back are, "how big is your platform" and "how far into your [final] editing process are you?" No serious developmental revisions are expected.

The Annie Lamotte days--when her beloved editor would tell her to go rewrite a book--are reserved for gigantic sellers and for those wee not-gigantic sellers (as Lamotte was herself) that are beloved of the PH, if not by the public. Those who work in that rarefied air: literature. But thousands--literally, thousands--of midlisters have been thrown out into the streets.

if your reading tastes are for literature, rejoice: your authors will probably still get some--not a lot--development and coaching. If you read genre fiction, fuhgeddaboudit.

For example, if anyone here remembers what Charlaine Harris and Laurell K. Hamilton were, status-wise and readership-wise, BEFORE they were widely discovered--solid midlisters--that group is essentially gone now. This is spectacularly true also over in Mystery and Suspense. I know of an author who, within the last few years, had a book come out in hardcover, from a BPH, and that book was nominated for BOTH an Edgar and a Macavity--that was dropped by his/her PH. Dropped. Not enough big-time sales, it seems, and s/he doesn't even need much editing. (Same author has had the last laugh, though; we produced a new series for him/her, direct-to-digital, which was then picked up by another BPH imprint, direct-to-the-front-table at B&N, and as of last week, has been picked up by NBC Prime for a new TV series that's going into pilot as I write this. But, the moral of the story remains: midlister, until now. 20+ years of being a solid, reliable, suspense-midlister.)

Writers previously pubbed and editors have been talking about the midlist death spiral for at least a decade now; one such example, from 2004: http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/...postcount=2227 . When this was first talked about, BTW, it was "chain bookstores out to kill the midlist," mind you, before anyone decides that somehow, this is ALSO Amazon's fault...

So, the idea that BPH's are essentially nurseries for good writers to become great writers, are incubators for talent...that's just not true any longer. Worse, there's a new and (to me) unpleasant sentiment, amongst many writers, that they just don't NEED that development time. They don't need the 10K hours, they don't need critiquing, editing, etc. I see that daily. They just don't want to put in the work, the time, the months, the years. It's all instant gratification. And I see myriad ms's come in that are good, but NOT great. They'll never see that thin air, at Amazon, the first-page of sales results, because they didn't have an editor, or even a solid critique group.

So, I concur, on one front with Tompe; once upon a time, in ye olden days, the BPH's and imprints had a real purpose in their development processes. Of course, "young" (read: new) writers still had to be in the 2%, to even make it over the transom. But nonetheless, young talent developed through tutelage and seeing what great editing could do for them. "Editors" in-house at places like Random House really existed. (Think Jack Nicholson in Wolf, sorta). But those days are GONE.

So, while you may wish to argue about how Amazon's alleged monopsony may affect the "good of the public," don't think that they're somehow killing off the benefits of trade-pubbing. Trade pubbing's big remaining benefit is advances; that's it. The old marketing machines, etc., that newer authors could rely on are pretty much dead, unless they knock it out of the park with the next Gone Girl. I wish--I really do--that it wasn't true. I've seen a lot of my favorite midlisters disappear from the shelves (and naturally, hope that they'll end up at my doors), but the Death Spiral is responsible for that. If anything, I would think that Amazon's very existence--the advent of web-ordering, etc., instead of "ordering to net" might help benefit those very midlisters, in maybe reversing the Death Spiral.

Now, THAT would be a true benefit.

One last thought about the Spate of Hate:

Spoiler:

Hitch