Quote:
Originally Posted by darryl
[...] Once again we agree. As authors demand and receive a greater share those 500 childrens books will not be published. Likewise unprofitable literary fiction, coffee table books etc. Indies have driven the price to readers down and the share of Authors up, partly by not engaging in such cross-subsidisation.
[...]
I also question the extent to which large publishers are now prepared to use profits to subsidise what they consider worthwhile but unprofitable books. Even if I accept that this has been a common practice in the past, the large publishers are now in the hands of large corporate groups with profit and returns to shareholders very much the major focus. [...]
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The thing that is not obvious in what Hitch was saying is that the big publishers are not choosing to lose money on children's books (and poetry and so on) for purely philanthropic reasons. There is a lot going on for which the financial details must be fairly ... interesting to analyse.
Partly there is a reputation aspect to this. A publisher is one of the big 5 because they publish as widely as they do.
Part is how scaling works. Printing presses and the people to run them cost money even when sitting idle, so printing books that merely break even can still be a positive. Some loss may be acceptable.
The same sorts of justifications exist for other infrastructure items. If you already own/employ them then you should keep them busy. If/As the industry evolves to more outsourcing this factor will change.
So even books that don't make significant money for the publisher contribute to keeping the publisher's resources in place for those books that do make significant money (and allow them to be produced at an overall lower cost).
There are probably other reasons too. Sometimes increasing scale changes things that are not obvious at smaller scales (and vice versa for that matter). It's why I get a bit frustrated with threads like this. If you're not in the middle of it, you're only seeing part of the picture.