| > The publisher is gambling. The quantity of risk they take on is generally lower in non-fiction and has been going down dramatically over the past few decades. The publisher/author financial model was built for a world where: - The publisher had to use expensive presses to print and bind hundreds of books at a time. - The publisher had to maintain relationships with thousands of independent bookstores and ship boxes of books to them using relatively primitive logistics and shipping channels. - Data on consumer demand and sales was hard to get and slow to update. - Typesetting a book required expensive hardware, specialized skills, and tons of labor. - Consumers had little information when choosing what books to buy, so a publisher's "brand" was an important and valuable signal for quality. None of this is true any more. Authors are expected to produce near copy-ready manuscripts. Desktop publishing makes typesetting dramatically easier. Books can be printed on demand one at a time near the location where it is sold. Shipping today is highly optimized. Bookstores have consolidated into a small number of mega-chains, and most people are simply buying from Amazon today anyway. Consumers have access to reviews and lots of other data to make informed choices so couldn't care less what publisher logo is on the back of the book. The fact that royalty rates have not changed to accommodate all of this is simply because authors are mostly unaware of this and let them get away with it. |