Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
For Indy authors/publishers the question of "working economically" is quite variable (we'd all love to make a living from it, but a more realistic expectation is supplemental income and we all have different expectations of what makes an acceptable supplement). For non-Indy publishers you need to look across a wide selection of the books they publish, because publishing has always been about using very good investments to support the new stuff that may or may not turn out to be good.
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This bears looking at in more detail.
The notion, that we pay more for books so that Publishers can then extend deals to unknowns, usually quite heavily in the publisher's favor, but clearly they sometimes take a punt for something they truly believe in, whether warranted or not.
Anyone with an ounce of knowledge about the industry, knows just how arbitrary or biased publisher support is. Many eventual big sellers over the years, have been rejected by most publishers time and time again. So much so, that many of us think that many publishers just really don't have a clue, but are often just a business taking what they think is the easy option to a quick buck.
Many publishers out there are guilty of destroying lives or making them difficult. Not so now so much, because we have the testing ground of Indies. And there are many Indie authors who have succeeded and then been offered a deal from Traditional publishers.
So clearly, the old-time publishers in many cases need to move on away from the old models and algorithms and start catching up with the rest and the modern world.
Why should us ebook buyers, have to prop up the old out-dated way of doing things? Which was often never very fair or good anyway.