Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
The author's advance is a cost to the publisher. It's a subsidy to the author.
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The point is that a books that debuts as a MMPB is unlikely to bring the author more than a couple of thousand dollars (if they're lucky - advances for some Romance genres are down to a few hundred). On average, the level of remuneration will be reflected in the quality of the work.
There's a reasonably healthy market at the low-end, largely driven by people who read huge amounts of minor variations on the same thing. It's a viable business model, but one in which the literary quality of the output is of little concern.
But it's not a model I want to see adopted by the industry as a whole. I want to see good authors earning advances that let them take some time off from their day-job, and that's not going to happen if their book debuts as a $6 PB unless they write a book a month.
If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.