Quote:
Originally Posted by pwalker8
I suspect that one would find that some publishers provide a lot of value to their authors, while other publishers provide value to some of their authors and yet other publishers provide little value to their authors. I use the term publisher with regards to the imprint rather than the overall corporate holding company. At least that is the sense I get from what various authors say.
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Are you actually surprised? You recognize yourself that best sellers sell. Ignore individual imprints for a second. For all intents and purposes each imprint operates on their own. It doesn't matter if the differences in each imprint comes from the staff or from orders of the holding company, or even higher up from the holding company that owns each Big5 (or Big6 if you want to include Amazon). Let's look at one imprint at a time.
For each imprint the same holds true: bestsellers sell. Smaller imprint, smaller scale bestseller. A bestseller is simply a better performing author or book than the others. Some bestsellers are created and others are rising. From a business's standpoint there is possibly a good reason to treat bestsellers favorably to maximize profits. Your best resources (advertising budget, better editors,, guidance, advise) have to go to the most promising book. If everybody gets treated the same, then the bestsellers will leave and find a better publisher. Most superstar bestsellers never leave because they get that extra special treatment. Why would they if their advance is so gigantic that the book never has a chance to technically "earn out".