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Originally Posted by charleski
The author's advance.
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The author's advance is a
cost to the publisher. It's a subsidy to the
author.
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There's certainly profit to be made at the low-end, but it's just not as much on a per-book basis.
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Correct. So MMPB editions are expected to make it up on volume, and sell a lot more copies. Sometimes they don't. and
most books never ":earn out" their advance.
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A lot of Genre fiction goes straight to video and debuts in paperback (this has been true of Genre fiction for decades). The publishers and authors adapt by pumping out large numbers of titles a year, which is easy if you're basically just writing from a template. Some Genre writers manage to produce excellent work despite these conditions, but there's still a lot of formulaic drek.
I certainly wouldn't like this to become the norm for the book industry as a whole.
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You can argue that it already
is.
People used to talk about "mainstream": and "The Great American Novel", but I don't think the former really exists these days, and in consequence, I don't think the latter is
possible.
Increasingly, the industry is genres - SF/fantasy, mysteries, thiller, chick lit, paranormal, family saga... There has always been a lot of formulaic drek, with Harlequin Romances as the archetypal example. But there are also enough books that manage to transcend the boundaries of whatever formula they are written to to provide more than enough things worth reading.
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Dennis