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There's one very important service the publisher provided, which the author missed: assessing whether the book was likely to be a successes. Telling people who
by wisty 13y ago
There's one very important service the publisher provided, which the author missed: assessing whether the book was likely to be a successes. Telling people who won't be successful not to bother (or at least, not to bother with an expensive campaign) is costly, and an important service.
Ironically, the people who pay for this service (i.e. the people who are successful) are the ones who don't really benefit from it.
- kd5bjo 13y agoBut they do benefit from it in the form of higher sales -- publishers that do a bad job at this generate a reputation for publishing bad books, which can make booksellers less likely to carry them and consumers less likely to give an author the benefit of the doubt.
- lingben 13y agoLoL you have it backwards. Publishers do not have magical pre-cognition of the success of a book. We have myriad examples of them shoveling money at authors for books which bombed and we also have them turning up their noses at manuscripts which went on to earn billions. Case in point, Harry Potter.
- wisty 13y agoSurvivorship bias. I bet they've knocked back a lot of books which wouldn't have made a lot of money.