2 ms·

Most of the risk that publishers take on is in the form of returns: retail booksellers effectively operate on consignment, which is one of the reasons the indus

Most of the risk that publishers take on is in the form of returns: retail booksellers effectively operate on consignment, which is one of the reasons the industry is so screwed up. It's also a big reason most trade published books don't earn out the advance. Editing, layout, artwork, and editing are outsourced. If you choose to self-pub, you can hire the same people the Big 6 publishers hire, as long as you're willing to do a little legwork to discover who they are. Kindle / ebook publishing is making the layout and printing part mostly obsolete. If you know HTML and a bit of CSS, you can write the book in native Kindle format - it's pretty similar to writing a blog post. (I tested this yesterday - it's not at all difficult.) Once you're done, you can publish in ~24 hours. That beats the 18-24 month trade publishing cycle. The successful self-pub authors have a lot of books, and doing it yourself makes it much easier to publish a few books every year. You also get to keep 70% of the sale price vs. the standard 5-15% royalty for trade publishing. I'm thinking long and hard before signing another trade publishing contract, that's for sure. If I do, it's going to be with the publisher's understanding that I'm fully capable of doing this myself, which should be reflected in the advance.

rst 16y ago
Outsourcing has gone farther than that --- at this point, they often outsourced even the business of coordinating the editorial and production functions, and you can hire those people too. (There's even a professional association: http://www.abpaonline.org http://www.abpaonline.org .) My running joke used to be that they'd outsourced everything but the rolodex. Then I found out that a lot of the production of the latest edition of my mother's "The Bond Book" (no fixed income investor should be without one!) had been outsourced to one of these guys; they'd outsourced the rolodex itself.

rst 16y ago

Outsourcing has gone farther than that --- at this point, they often outsourced even the business of coordinating the editorial and production functions, and you can hire those people too. (There's even a professional association: http://www.abpaonline.org http://www.abpaonline.org .) My running joke used to be that they'd outsourced everything but the rolodex. Then I found out that a lot of the production of the latest edition of my mother's "The Bond Book" (no fixed income investor should be without one!) had been outsourced to one of these guys; they'd outsourced the rolodex itself.