I'm not trying to say that there's some conspiracy to exclude the Oppressed Good Writers, like our hypothetical Joe Schmoe, or a real writer named Cherie who wrote possibly the worst science fiction novel ever committed (please don't post her full name lest you attract her!). What I'm saying is that any given publisher only can only bring out X titles per year, and in the pre-ebook days, there were only a handful (relatively speaking) of publishers, so they are accustomed to deciding which books get published and which don't. The decision as to who is a "real author" and who is a slushpile reject lay with them and them alone, and that position led to a certain mindset which is killing them today. They still think of books as "paper things things we print and sell" when books have become something much more complex than that.
As far as "...finders, nurturers, marketers of writing that they think either deserves an audience or will sell for some other reason...", from a reader's perspective, they are looking more and more like "packagers of whatever can make some fast money in the three months it's in the stores before people come to their senses." Risk-averse bean counters want guaranteed sales, which works in favor of the next scandalous celebrity bio instead of the next genuinely great novel, or even the next book that will still be selling five years from now.
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But mostly, what's published lies above some basic threshold of quality. And the editing process helps to ensure that. The same does not apply across the board to self-publishing.
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That's the idea, anyway. Except that the quality has been sinking, the quality:price ratio has been sinking faster, and I'm getting a feeling that instead of trying to maintain the value of their imprint, or perhaps their imprimatur, they're just trading on their names until they wear them out, at which point they have nothing. Look at how GM screwed themselves with the Cadillac Cimarron, which did to Cadillac what no competitor ever could. Apparently nobody told them that sticking a Cadillac badge on a Chevy Cavalier doesn't improve the Cavalier; instead it debases the Cadillac brand.* True, GM had been just slapping those badges on second-rate cars for a number of years, but the Cimarron was the final straw.
By the way, I'm curious: how much of publishers' business problems do you feel are the result of the excesses of the 90's, with the insane bidding wars, outrageous advances for books not yet written, etc?
*note for non-car-geeks: the Cadillac Cimarron was meant to compete with European sport sedans. So far so good, except it was quite literally a Chevy Cavalier with a fancy trim package and a whopping price tag. It nearly destroyed Cadillac as a brand, and the marque still has not fully recoverd.