Quote:
Originally Posted by L.J. Sellers
I've been reading about new publishing start-ups with a different business model: no advance, bigger royalties, small POD digital print runs, and e-books published at the same time with competitive pricing. ... I think this is a sustainable, reader-friendly model that could be successful...if it gets the distribution.
What do you think?
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My feeling is, it isn't going to be nearly as successful as some people hope or expect.
Like it or not, people still like hits; and many writers and artists want to make hits. That system may change a bit -- e.g. some of the current major players may get killed, new ones will appear, niche markets may operate a little differently -- but it is likely that the system will still be dominated by big companies with substantial resources.
As the cost of publishing and distributing a book bottoms out, the amount of books in the "Internet Slush Pile" (i.e. books that no publisher wanted to back) is steadily increasing. As a result, there is already a massive number of borderline unreadable books that the average person or a book reviewer is unlikely to want to wade through.
Plus, this isn't quite as big a change as it might seem, since POD and self-publishing options have been around for quite some time.
Another way to put it is, in a "no advance, high royalty" system almost all of the costs and responsibilities get pushed back onto the artist. The less the publisher/distributor provides, the more skills the author needs to pay for or earn.
For some -- particularly authors who already established some sort of following, and manage to get their ebook rights back -- it might work out. However, in those cases a lot of the heavy lifting (particularly the editing) was already done. Unpublished writers, not so much.