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One thing that hurt Samhain (and probably similar pubs) are that they lost a lot of their bigger authors to both NY and to Self-pub.
Authors like Maya Banks, Lorelei James & Lauren Dane got big deals with Big 5 publishers and while Dane & James still published some with Samhain some it was much less frequently.
Authors like Moira Rogers (aka Kit Rocha, aka...) started self-publishing and were very successful at it and slowly moved all their publishing to self-pubbing.
Now it's not like those authors didn't get replaced by others, but the new authors coming in came into a much more competitive market and Samhain didn't seem to promote them any where near the way they did in the early days.
Also most/all(?) of the Big 5 launched their own digital first lines which were more direct competition for Samhain than the more traditional branches of those houses. The launch of Carina Press in particular not only attracted a lot of Samhain authors, but lost Samhain the services of Angie James as Executive Editor when she moved to a similar position at Carina (technically she quit to head up Quartet Press, but that never actually launched IIRC). Samhain seemed to have a different "feel" after James & some others left at least for me. They also soured some of the author community by playing some games on reversions of older titles a few years ago IIRC.
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