Publishing is broken.

[tuftears]

Here's the story of how an author's book is rejected by a series of publishers due to lackluster sales of previous books. When the author submits manuscript under different name, it is accepted within three days.

I'm just... well. Flabbergasted. This system is broken, if the publishers are blinded by numbers and it takes someone deliberately masking their identity to get them to look at the story. The conventional wisdom is that new writers have it the hardest, after all, since publishers would rather go with a known quantity... But if the known quantities don't sell as well-- and they will inevitably fall off, since publishers will only issue print runs up to the limit of those that sold on the previous book-- then gradually the publishers will ease authors off of their lists.

It's called 'planned obsolescence'. Of writers.

Rebroadcast from marthawells.

Comments

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

It is scary though, when they only print X copies and they set X to be the number that actually sold last time, because functionally you're almost always going to sell fewer than X, since they can only sell what they have on display!

But your point is taken, the editors are adapting to the book buyers' habits. It shouldn't be surprising that the editors will remove inefficiencies by using the same devices the book buyers do to determine whether they should buy a story. That this creates inevitable midlist author churn is not exactly their problem... But it does create weird adaptions like the pen name thing.

*looks up Twenty Palaces blog*

*starts leafing through it*

[wordslinger.livejournal.com]

There's also the issue that they figure a new writer will not make back the advance. Let's say I get a $3,000 advance (I did once) for a book. The publisher can sell 600 of them priced at $10/book (because they have to give bookstores a discount) and make that back.

My advance would get credited at about 25 cents per book. So on those 600 books, I've repaid exactly $150 of the $3,000 advance. Truth is, darn few of us ever get to the point where the publishers have to pay us.

I like epubs, but the problem is that there's a LOT of them and there's a LOT of drivel. Some of it is probably mine.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the big crisis for epubs is going to be the evolution of sites to refer people to the good ones... Since tastes vary so much, expect to see a veritable forest of reviews, or maybe something that recommends based on what you've already read and liked, rather than a one-size-fits-all site!

As for advances -- that's the publisher not guessing right about how much of an advance they should offer, no?