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Originally Posted by DMcCunney
What major romance publisher do you know that pays an advance that low?
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http://www.carolynjewel.com/craft/warnings.shtml
http://answers.google.com/answers/th...id/136883.html
The threshold to membership of the RWA's Published Author's Network is an advance of
$1000.
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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.
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Baen has a highly-stratified publishing strategy. They put out full-price hardbacks for authors with established selling-power and trade PBs for those who sell at a lower level. Their ARC program is a canny way to get the more avid fans to pay for a book twice, and do so with a smile. As you yourself noted, they're actively looking for ways to add value to their books in order to attract customers at a premium price-point.
I'd say Baen's strategy is about as far as you can get from the typical genre-fiction race to the bottom. And it shows in the quality of the work that they publish.
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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.)
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Self-publishing is a serious option for some genre writers, take a look at
J.A. Konrath's breakdown. It's instructive to see how exquisitely price-sensitive his sales are, demonstrating the extent to which this has become a commodity market. If all the books on the shelf are much the same, then you might as well go for the cheapest one.