Quote:
Originally Posted by barryem
I read an article somewhere this weekend, on some blog, discussing the fact that the big publishers are beginning to drop their midlist authors for some sort of economic reasons. If that's true we'll probably have more and better writers being self-published and going to small publishers in the near future.
Barry
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In that case, the big 5 publishers, owning hundreds of former smaller publishing houses, will thus only publish the major best-sellers... which will not necessarily be the best books. That way, getting published by a big publishing house will be less and less attainable for new writers.
Taking this situation to the extreme, it will mean that the big publishers will merge into 4 publishers, where there will be new midlist authors that will be dropped, which will make it harder for newer people to be published, lowering the publisher's income because fewer and fewer new books will be published, which will cause them to merge into 3 publishers.... and so on.
In the end, following this rationale, the big 5 will be gone, replaced by hundreds of new small publishers... and we're back in 1900 again, with the exception that there's now an internet which gives everyone access to any book of any publisher, all over the world.