|
The new seven figure contracts are going to authors who established themselves on their oen, outside the tradpub establishment. These are newcomers who have effectively short circuited the entire traditional gatekeeping process and jumped right to the top tier.
When it comes go content acquisition, the process at the BPHs is a zero-sum game. Money that goes to one manuscript doesn't go to another. Given the disparity of contracts given to newcomers commonly run in the low 4-figure and occasionally as high as mid five figures, each author getting a million dollar contract is soaking up enough money to acquire a hundred manuscripts. A seven million dollar contract can easily mean a thousand other manuscripts go unfunded. And if those thousand manuscripts don't get published by the BPHs they will either go to other "lesser" tradpubs or go to the Indie side. Either way, the BPH footprint declines.
The issue isn't whether the BPH makes money of the million dollar contracts (they obviously expect to do so) but that as the size of their new release catalog goes down, their lose the chance to catch the next Nora Roberts or the next Patterson (or the next Wild or Wilder) on the cheap.
In 2014, the randy penguin was expected to publish over 14,000 titles, of which maybe a hundred became bestsellers. Very few of which actually got million dollar advances. If by 2018 the price for *potential* bestsellers runs in the million dollar range, of even in the mid 6 figure range, randy penguin is *not* going to be publishing 14,000 titles. They might not be publishing 7000. The other 7000 BPH-quality titles will be forced to find alternate wYs to market.
The BPHs are already operating on a Hollywood-style "blockbuster" economy where the big money comes from only a handful of new releases and from milking the backlist so there is plenty of incentive to reduce the number of new titles and consolidate their manuscript spending on likely bestsellers. Which is what seems to be happening.
The BPHs will remain profitable because remaining profitable is the only way the glass tower execs will retain their jobs. But the road to profitability requires that they publish less new titles, rely more on casual reader-driven bestsellers, pay bigger advances for the titles they do publish, charge more for new release ebooks, and trade off unit sales for profits.
Publishing 10,000 new titles a year is not an option; they need to concentrate sales on less titles to maintain the Premium pricing model.
This will inevitably make them a less viable market for mid-list authors and newcomers (less submissions) and make them miss out on the next generation of bestselling authors until *after* they break out on their own. The BPHs, like the Hollywood studios, will become a blockbuster-only, business. Kinda like Disney, if they're lucky.
It's a feedback spiral in the making...
|