Quote:
Originally Posted by MGlitch
I've seen claims here that publishers should treat the editors, artists, and authors better. Including better royalties, and better overall pay. Yet I've also seen a fairly strong claim that ebook prices are, currently, too high.
These seem to me to be mutually exclusive if you accept that the profit margins on ebooks versus pbooks is, relatively, narrow, and consider that most BPH's release print and digital versions of their books. I'm not saying ebook sales should prop up pbooks, nor the other way around. Though big name authors do prop up new authors, and thus -book- sales prop up -book- sales.
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Sorry, but neither is quite true.
BPH margins are not thin. Their net runs in the double digits (which most businesses would kill for) despite vast inefficiencies and waste.
Check the chart here:
http://the-digital-reader.com/2014/0...ustry-numbers/
Or this one, for the big picture:
http://publishers.org/news/us-publis...n-revenue-2014
One BPH, for example, houses their datacenter in the Flatiron building in the middle of Manhattan, an iconic and very very expen$ive building to rent space in. They use it as a wiring closet.
The smallest of the BPHs has something like 19 VPs, all making big salaries.
And of course, they all occupy glass towers in Manhattan and London, not Michigan (Amazon Publishing) or North Carolina (Baen) or elsewhere, like many other smaller publishers. Lots of other examples of inefficiency abound. Just moving to a different NYC address, say the Bronx or Queens, would probably let them double creative staff salaries. Not that they ever would.
And no, big name authors do not subsidize midlisters or newcomers, rather the opposite. The big name authors receive enormous upfront lump sum payment for their titles that far exceed any nominal royalties the book could ever earn them. Which isn't to say the publisher loses money; it's just that the revenue split isn't as one-sided as for "lesser" authors. Likewise, they don't lose money on midlister titles that don't "earn out". The advances are so small and royalties so low and, above all, they do so little to promote them the titles make money off pre-release sales alone. When a midlister is dropped for low projected sales it isn't because they are costing the publisher money--the only titles they actually lose money on are politician campaign books where they pay tens of millions to buy political influence. Midlisters are dropped because they are filling a slot in the schudules but aren't generating enough net cash to meet the publisher's ambitions.
There is a reason why midlisters who got their titles reverted, back when that was still possible, all went on to make way more money off the same titles as Indies.
Publishing ala BPH is very profitable despite their best efforts to make it unprofitable. (On paper. Lots of Hollywood accounting going on.)
Even in "bad times" they are still raking it in, and not just off the predatory author contracts, unpaid interns, and constant downsizings. They could afford to lower prices or treat employees and suppliers better or both. They just choose not to.
Mostly because they don't have to.
Again, they have no shortage of dreamers who are willing to put up with those terms just for the perceived prestige of a contract or a title.