Stewart Stremler wrote:
begin quoting James E. Henderson as of Thu, Nov 23, 2006 at 07:56:20PM -0800:
[snip]
Publishers also try to shaft the authors in many other ways. They make
very limited attempts to sell the books, sending them out to stores just
once and then dropping them if there isn't an overwhelming response by
the public in a very short time.
The stores are to blame as well; they get to request books, and then
they remainder 'em to make room for the new books coming in. Why would
the publisher send out books more than once to a store that has already
sent back the covers to a ton of books for a refund?
Still, this is a very real problem. If you aren't a big name and you
aren't new, you will likely have problems with mind-share. Like many
people, publishers are looking for the Next Big Thing.
They demand that the authors go on
book-signing publicity tours at their own expense, providing almost no
additional publicity themselves.
If the publishers were covering publicity tours, I would think that the
publisher/author relationship would be dangerously close to work-for-hire.
(And I'd be really suprised to see the contract where the publisher
demands that the author promotie their work.)
It's in the author's best interest to promote their book. If the
publisher is going to pay for that, the money will have to come from
somewhere -- presumably, from the author's cut.
And then you'd end up where some authors would travel in greater style
than they would otherwise (wasting money), or not in a style to which
they are used to (making the author miserable), in which case we'd be
here pointing out that the inefficiencies of the publisher's publicity
machine was taking money away from authors....
That's why so many authors now are
doing their own publishing, selling their books at fairs and at lectures
they give. And self-publishing has become much easier and cheaper with
the advent of print-on-demand services.
You'd think that if that really worked, more mid-list authors would be
taking that route. So I'm wondering what the hidden tradeoff is.
The "Next Big Thing" may be here: e-Ink books. Sony has begun selling an
e-Ink book reader for about $350 ... but newspaper publishers have
indicated they may give similar readers to their subscribers to update
online daily because that's cheaper than the cost of paper for a year.
E-Ink is slow -- it takes about half a second to update a page -- but it
requires no power to continue to display a page and it is said to be
very easy to read in a well-lighted area.
James
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James E. Henderson
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