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Originally Posted by charleski
I know people who work in the publishing industry. I've asked them how much they think an author should gain from the sale of their work, and it always boils down to less than ten percent of the sale price. That's just not good enough.
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H'm. So if you know people in the industry, you also know that most titles don't even break even, let alone turn a profit for the publisher, correct? And that the margins in book publishing are, to put it mildly, rather thin?
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Originally Posted by charleski
[It] becomes pretty hard to justify when you find out that the vast majority of what you pay is actually going into the pockets of middle-men who invested nearly nothing in the creation of the work you're reading.
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Not really, it's only hard if you have an overly simplistic view of how the book industry works.
The retailer is doing a ton of work (e.g. inventory / web hosting, customer service, payment processing, website maintenance, bandwidth) and takes their cut; that might be 25-30% -- assuming a wholesale price of $10, retail of $15. If it's a paper book, production and distribution costs take another 12-15%. Then you have editing, proofreading, typesetting / format prepping, legal review, graphic design, fact checking, taxes. Some lucky authors even get marketing, PR and advertising support. Oh, and the author's advance and royalties.
And let's face it, even though it is almost certainly easier to publish a book now than at any time in the past: most artists simply do not have the requisite skills, resources, knowledge and/or inclination to be their own publishers. (And nowadays, there isn't much to stop an author from being their own publisher, if that is their preference.)
Or to put it another way: Do you tell your friends in the book industry that they do nothing, add no value to the process, and are parasites who suck the life out of the authors?
I.e. all this seems like "nothing" because not a lot of people do not know how the proverbial sausage is made. I won't say that publishers and retailers are golden knights who save the world, or that every single person in the book biz is a workaholic who slaves tirelessly and thanklessly at their tasks. But to proclaim publishers as greedy fiends is to vastly overestimate the profit margins of the industry; and to say that publishers and retaielrs do nothing at all but skim profits is an insult to the people who work hard at all levels of the industry.