[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by charleski

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.

What major romance publisher do you know that pays an advance that low?

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.

There has always been a segment of the market like that. The Harlequin Romance is the usual example pointed to, but there are publishers devoted to serving specific market segments that specialize in particular types of things. Pocket Books' Star Trek line is another. A higher end example is Baen Books, publishing mid-level action/adventure SF/fantasy. They'll do very well by a David Weber or David Drake. They are unlikely to publish a Jonathan Carroll or Graham Joyce.

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.

And good authors do. But it takes them a while to reach that stage, and some unfortunately don't.

Incidentally, the average price for an MMPB these days is $8. I haven't seen one at $6 in some time.

If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.

Not always. Given the number of people going for what are effectively vanity press deals under different names, you might well get decent stuff, even at minuscule advances. (And there are a few experiments going on by small presses using a "No advance but higher royalty level"approach to reduce the risk to the publisher but reward the author if the book succeeds.)

The trick is building the author to the level where their sales are enough that they can quit their day jobs. (For most, frankly, this will not happen.)
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Dennis