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Interesting article on SF&F publishing

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Re: Interesting article on SF&F publishing
Post by The E   » Sun Jul 15, 2018 9:33 am

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kzt wrote:The big publishing houses select who they want to be a big success and push them. If you are not on their list of favored authors then they don't do anything for you, don't reprint your books, etc. There are interesting horror stories of how this works out there.

Part of that is why people decide to work for Manhattan publishers. It doesn't pay well and you are working in one of the most expensive city in the world. It's not that they want to make big bucks, at least as real potential.

So their personal objective fundamentally isn't to sell books. It's to "be in publishing" and do "good things" which means you select what books you like based on how they appeal to your values.

If you happen to find the values of the typical Manhattanite publisher drone to be uninspiring they tend to not like your books.

Amazon wants to sell books. They want to make money. Everything they do is based on getting people to buy stuff from them. So they will push your book in front of people who seem likely to buy it without worrying about is the message or what they think is the authors political beliefs.


kzt, there's a whole lot of culture war bullshit in this post of yours that can't really be replied to, since it touches on things that are functionally equivalent to religious beliefs.

But here's the fundamental bits where you are wrong:
1. Publishers want to sell books, first and foremost. They buy manuscripts that they think will sell, or invest in authors they think have potential; politics enters into this, but much less than you might think.
2. Amazon is not apolitical. Their politicism is just expressed in terms of algorithms rather than press releases; their algorithms make decisions that humans are rarely able to audit.
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Re: Interesting article on SF&F publishing
Post by kzt   » Sun Jul 15, 2018 12:51 pm

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The companies that own publishers want to make money. A lot of money. That’s part of the crisis in publishing, as there really wasn’t a significant quarter to quarter growth in publishing. People who went into publishing don’t see it as selling widgets, they see it in other terms. And that isn’t how the book business has historically worked, but when they were bought up by huge multinational corporations they demanded continually increasing profits and sales.

The consolidation of the retail end by Borders and B&N is another part of that. Essentially the dozen or so senior book buyers who worked for them were the sole customers that mattered for the US non-textbook, non-technical publishers. And it turns out that what appealed of the dozen top book buyers at Borders and B&N were not particularly congruent with what appealed to people who actually buy books. And suddenly there was an alternative...
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Re: Interesting article on SF&F publishing
Post by vovchara   » Mon Jul 16, 2018 12:18 pm

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Personally, as a reader, I prefer Self-Publishing Authors. True, they often have atrocious editing and outlandish ideas, but they publish when they are done. Often more than once a year. And since a lot of them participate in Kindle Unlimited it is no real hardship to check an unknown Author. So much so I stopped to buy books when they cost more than 5€ when it's not David Weber, Eric Flint, John Birmingham, Myke Cole, David Drake, Elizabeth Moon, Tanya Huff and a couple more. But the sad thing is, some of them already finished their next book, for a long time. For example, I bought eArc for UH by David Weber, but when I waited for the regular release I would still be waiting.
The sad thing is, most of the regular authors on my list are working with 2-3 publishing houses and writing in the same genre, so I often have to wait more than a year for titles, which are already in the pipeline.
In the meantime, I bought or read through Kindle Unlimited 30-40 books by Indi authors and my list of the tradional "blind buy" authors is getting smaller and smaller, some I don't even check anymore.
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Re: Interesting article on SF&F publishing
Post by phillies   » Mon Jul 16, 2018 4:03 pm

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In evaluating how lucrative traditional as opposed to electronic publishing is, many analyses appear to omit the big fat ZERO return from trad publishing for the vast number of writers who are unable to sell to a traditional publisher. (As it happens, I have tried to sell to whom I shall not name. multiple times.)

Toni Weisskopf is fairly straightforward as to how often she is able to pick up a new author from her slush pile, given her obligations to her current authors, reprints, and the number of slots S&S gives her. For the vast majority of writers the dollars available from trad publishing is ZERO, so independent publishing is guaranteed to be more lucrative, even for a bottom of the barrel author such as myself.

That's also true if your main reward is the egoboo of selling some copies of a book. Almost all writers will never get that from trad publishing.

And if you are considering trying to sell to Baen, a noble task given that Toni Weisskopf is the best SF editor in the history of the universe, ask yourself: Are you a better writer than Crhis Nuttall, who appears with some frequency at the holy gates of Bean but us never granted admission?
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Re: Interesting article on SF&F publishing
Post by Annachie   » Mon Jul 16, 2018 5:15 pm

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The thing I really like about normal Kindle is downloading samples to read later. ;)
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You are so going to die. :p ~~~~ runsforcelery
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still not dead. :)
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