Rachel Garrett wrote:
Why then do the warhorse authors continue to go back to publishers?
These are people who have what it takes to "break free", if publishers
were all about taking advantage of authors. Patricia Cornwell, Stephen
King, Tom Clancy, et al. have enough star power to publicize their own
books, and the capital to self-publish.
Effort.
The marketing machine will go to work for Stephen King. Stephen King
could probably make more money by going the self-whatever route, but
it's a lot less effort for him just to throw it to the publisher.
If you are not a marquee name, its a different story. In fact, several
of the technical book authors have done better by putting the book on
the web for free. Instead of wasting their time shopping the book
around, the publisher came to them. This put them into the same
category as Stephen King, maybe they might make a more money if they did
it themselves, but the effort was far less to let a publisher do it.
(see: Dive Into Python and Practical Common Lisp).
One of the interesting arguments is that copyright actually benefits us
*more* now that authors can put works on the web and on-demand printing
is coming online. Without copyright, I seriously doubt things like The
Baen Free Library (http://www.baen.com/library/) would exist.
-a
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