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Originally Posted by plib
Biter bit! Meeow!
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You *have* heard the stories of authors dumped because one book "underperforms", right?
I have no personal experience, not being one, but the stories and names abound. Even around here.
The word is that today the BPHs have been ditching mid-list authors left and right and raising the bar on what they consider successful. (Authors with books selling 30,000 a year are no longer worth keeping, for example.)
In a one-strike-and-you're-out environment like that there is no loyalty given or expected, regardless of what BPH apologists think. It is strictly business at the BPHs, these days.
Which makes *this* recent piece relevant, I suppose:
http://kriswrites.com/2012/06/13/the...hurry-up-wait/
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Traditional publishers, with their high overhead, can’t afford to continually publish a writer who underperforms. What is an underperformance? That varies from company to company (and often genre to genre), so I can’t tell you. But your editor will when it comes time to buy the next book. Either she can buy it or she can’t. Then you’ll know that year’s magic threshold of sales. Next year’s might be higher or, as we learned in the Great Recession, lower. But whatever that arbitrary in-house number is, you need to meet it, or you won’t sell that company another book under that name for years to come.
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It is primarily about the difference in processes and attitudes for traditional and self-publishing but in passing it does explicitly describe the state of traditional publishing and what a mid-lister can expect. The comments are interesting, too.
Again, I've seen nothing as to why Goodkind is venturing into self pub but I'm not surprised; he is neither the first nor will he be the last. In the modern publishing business (BPH style) there is no room for loyalty on either side, if there ever was.