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From a competition standpoint? The worry is that a merger would reduce upfront payments to authors because there is less competition (among other things). Auth
by bwb 4y ago
From a competition standpoint?
The worry is that a merger would reduce upfront payments to authors because there is less competition (among other things). Authors like upfront payments as it reduces the risk for them. However, it is unclear if this would reduce payments as the market is pretty fractured.
"but why does that matter so long as there is a cheap, non-censored method of getting writings out into the ether?"
Many authors are not technical, and for them, dealing with formatting, uploading it to services, and all that "tech" stuff is immensely hard (especially if they have an FT job and a family).
And, to create a great book requires a great editor most of the time. That isn't cheap, especially if they are going deep into your story. Traditional publishing is still a huge stamp of quality that helps sell books, gets the author exposure, and gets you in physical bookstores.
Plus, if you are a new author, you write book(s) while doing something FT. That is hard; if payments go down, you could lose entire generations of authors as they don't have the time or money to devote to writing. We probably already are losing generations of authors given how rough the market is with the changes over the last 20 years.
Does that help?
- ghaff 4y ago>And, to create a great book requires a great editor most of the time. How many publishers actually provide serious story development support to authors starting out? Never done fiction but development editing in my non-fiction case was mostly in molding to house style. Even all the changes I made in v2 were essentially all of my own doing.
- bwb 4y agoYa, from my conversations with authors not often, but an author will often pay out of contracts. But, if you are on book 3 of a well-selling series at Tor I bet you do (I don't know just guessing). Did you get any help from an editor or was that out of pocket?
- ghaff 4y agoI didn't need--or at least didn't think I needed--any serious outside structural editing. They did do "developmental" (but minor) and copyediting. I write a lot and knew the topic pretty well. I had work colleagues read over for tech review as appropriate. I have been paid out a little above advance but we're talking very small numbers for someone on a decent tech salary. The benefit was 90% reputational.
- SamoyedFurFluff 4y agoFiction side here: this is actually a question in flux. It used to be that you could expect serious developmental edits from an editor and also your agent on top of multiple copy editing rounds. However the recent cuts in labor has limited how much editors can read or acquire, which then affects how many books agents can represent and then forcibly raises the bar for the quality of submitted manuscripts. It’s like the post doc problem (where phd graduates are pressured to take more and more extreme measures to be qualified for a professorship position and therefore do significant work for exceptionally little or no gain).