Publishing is broken.

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.