Quote:
Originally Posted by gandor62
Nowdays we all seem to have this idea that we need publishers to tell us what is good or not as we obviously cant think for ourselves.
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I can think for myself just fine, thanks. But there are only so many hours in a week, I work full-time, attend graduate classes, and my husband and kids would like to see me occasionally, and if I want to get any good reading done (i.e. I actually enjoy the experience), I'd have to sift through an awful lot of slush if I started just trying to read every book a self-proclaimed author posted to the web (free or not). Frankly, I don't have time. This is one of those cases where I'd rather pay someone to do something I don't have time to do... in this case, I'd pay a "finder's fee" to a professional editor with tastes relatively similar to mine to find books I'd probably like to read.
The publishing "gate" is probably too small right now, but that's partly because there's very little money to be made in publishing midlist books. Despite the fact that many of the costs would still be the same for ebooks as for pbooks, I think there are a lot of inefficiencies in the pbook system that could be eliminated and might rescue the midlist catalog, e.g. paper/printing/binding, shipping, "stripped" returns, etc. I don't happen to think that good editorial services are one of the processes that ought to be eliminated. Your mileage may vary, of course.
