It's really very simple. Publishing is a business. In the 80's there was effectively no price competition. Now there is. The "fat" is no longer there. This extract from KKR's blog article sets out her perception of their response.
Quote:
The midlist writers had already been cut from the lists, and I expected more midlist writers to get cut. Traditional publishers had long since stopped building writers’ careers, and hoped only for big mega bestsellers.
Traditional publishers had figured out, about 2005 or so, that their current business model worked on hope, not on hard work. They would rather buy a brand-new untested author, lock them up for a two-book contract and hope that those books sold better than the books already in the stable.
That didn’t work, so a lot of careers have been cut short.
But the second-tier bestsellers—I simply expected them to take less money than they had before.
And some of them are. One friend tells me that per book, he makes exactly one-tenth of what he earned ten years ago. He’s writing more and getting paid less. He’s also not getting royalties or subsidiary rights sales, because publishers are licensing everything.
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