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The most-disliked people in the publishing industry

woman-of-letters.com

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Re: The most-disliked people in the publishing industry

#11

Post by delichon »

I hope The Martian becomes the template of a new publishing world. Andy Weir couldn't get any publisher's attention until he self published and achieved 35,000 sales in three months without their help. He succeeded by word of mouth and not publisher's marketing.

Almost all of the fiction I read comes by personal recommendations. Including from social media like Hacker News. I haven't stood in a bookstore browsing shelves and reading blurbs in many years but I read more than ever.

A publisher provides marketing, editing and distribution. Literary marketing is becoming better in the peer-to-peer form than the old business-to-consumer form. Distribution has become unbundled via self-publishing. Editing is no less important than ever, but it would be so much better if the value from such an individual art can be captured by those talented individuals rather than by corporate.

Long live literature, but may Big Publishing fade away into obsolescence.

Re: The most-disliked people in the publishing industry

#12

Post by didgetmaster »

christkv wrote: post #3

Most books are loss leaders for publishing houses very few are profitable and even fewer are massively profitable. They keep publishing books that barely anybody reads because they have to have a diverse catalog.

It mirrors the venture capital business. Invest in 100 projects. Know that 90 of them will likely fail, 7 or 8 will break even, and just 2 or 3 will succeed. Hope that the successful ones are big enough to cover all the losses of the others plus some.

Re: The most-disliked people in the publishing industry

#13

Post by mistrial9 »

didgetmaster wrote: post #12
christkv wrote: post #3

Most books are loss leaders for publishing houses very few are profitable and even fewer are massively profitable. They keep publishing books that barely anybody reads because they have to have a diverse catalog.

It mirrors the venture capital business. Invest in 100 projects. Know that 90 of them will likely fail, 7 or 8 will break even, and just 2 or 3 will succeed. Hope that the successful ones are big enough to cover all the losses of the others plus some.

no - capital intensive business has very different patterns than popular media business. The visibility of the VCs and the visibility of publishing houses has some small overlap. Day-to-day and implementation details, timelines for success.. audience, partners.. so many things are starkly different IMHO

Re: The most-disliked people in the publishing industry

#14

Post by everdrive »

christkv wrote: post #3

Most books are loss leaders for publishing houses very few are profitable and even fewer are massively profitable. They keep publishing books that barely anybody reads because they have to have a diverse catalog.

>because they have to have a diverse catalog.

Why must they have a diverse catalog?

Re: The most-disliked people in the publishing industry

#15

Post by tptacek »

Bertelsmann (the owner of Random House) is a for-profit corporation just like Palantir (a defense contractor), but the employees of Random House don’t need to be paid as much as the employees at Palantir, because Random House is perceived (by its employees) as fundamentally good

No? The employees of Random House don't need to be paid as much because the supply of qualified candidates for those roles greatly exceeds the demand. There are lots of causes of that imbalance and most of them have nothing to do with the perceived righteousness of publishing. It's also hard to get a job in the abusive video game development industry!

Re: The most-disliked people in the publishing industry

#16

Post by conception »

bombcar wrote: post #8
BigTTYGothGF wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they have to have a diverse catalog. They have to have a diverse catalog because they don't know in advance which books will be the big sellers.

Tolkien and Rowling probably combine to be the majority of British publishing revenues ...

Dav Pilkey is basically western comic books right now. One of his books outsells all traditional publishers - Marvel, DC, IDW, etc.

Re: The most-disliked people in the publishing industry

#17

Post by dxdm »

tptacek wrote: post #15

Bertelsmann (the owner of Random House) is a for-profit corporation just like Palantir (a defense contractor), but the employees of Random House don’t need to be paid as much as the employees at Palantir, because Random House is perceived (by its employees) as fundamentally good No? The employees of Random House don't need to be paid as much because the supply of qualified candidates for those roles greatly exceeds t…

Where does the supply come from? You could still argue that people choose this as a career when they have the choice of better-paid ones, increasing the supply of people with the smarts and training needed by the publishers.

I don't know if that's what's happening, but it might work towards TFA's point.

Re: The most-disliked people in the publishing industry

#18

Post by jfengel »

tptacek wrote: post #15

Bertelsmann (the owner of Random House) is a for-profit corporation just like Palantir (a defense contractor), but the employees of Random House don’t need to be paid as much as the employees at Palantir, because Random House is perceived (by its employees) as fundamentally good No? The employees of Random House don't need to be paid as much because the supply of qualified candidates for those roles greatly exceeds t…

Some of it has to do with the perceived righteousness of publishing. A lot of those jobs involve holding people's hands, "emotional labor", like nursing and teaching. These jobs are seen as something people (women, mostly) should do because they like being carers, rather than for the money. These jobs end up being paid less than they are really worth, especially since they often involve many hours without compensation.

That's hardly the only factor here. In the end it's really about the fact that we appear to have an infinite appetite for blowing people up. ($1.5 trillion, next year, a full 50% increase at a time when we're supposedly needing to cut back.)

But don't discount the thumb on the scale against jobs like these. It's a persistent problem in many industries -- so pervasive that it just looks natural.

Re: The most-disliked people in the publishing industry

#19

Post by jfengel »

delichon wrote: post #11

I hope The Martian becomes the template of a new publishing world. Andy Weir couldn't get any publisher's attention until he self published and achieved 35,000 sales in three months without their help. He succeeded by word of mouth and not publisher's marketing. Almost all of the fiction I read comes by personal recommendations. Including from social media like Hacker News. I haven't stood in a bookstore browsing she…

The Martian was published in 2011. There are vanishingly few like it since then.

Sometimes a book gets picked up purely on its merits. (It helps to appeal to a wealthy target audience.) But on average you'd get richer by getting a minimum wage job and spending it all on lottery tickets.

Re: The most-disliked people in the publishing industry

#20

Post by [deleted] »

delichon wrote: post #11

I hope The Martian becomes the template of a new publishing world. Andy Weir couldn't get any publisher's attention until he self published and achieved 35,000 sales in three months without their help. He succeeded by word of mouth and not publisher's marketing. Almost all of the fiction I read comes by personal recommendations. Including from social media like Hacker News. I haven't stood in a bookstore browsing she…

[deleted]
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