The Economics of Book Publication

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Bad numbers look bad for an economics major! From someone who worked at the first online legal publisher for seven years (a rare market in which the customer is forced to buy the product), I feel qualified to tell people that FaerieUnicornsLOLblog987.wordpress does not lend credibility to your online opinion writings, either. A domain is what, 10 dollars a year? What's the first thing that they tell 101/102 English students in college these days about being critical of their online sources? Look at the domain, if it's a blog site or Wikipedia, it's not credible.

That said, here's the worthwhile bit of the article in my opinion...

They can’t possibly read every single book—no matter how badly they may want to—and cram into that same lifetime all the hours of work, social media, domestic chores, and family obligations, and that time becomes very scarce indeed. So the readers have to be picky about which books they commit to, and we, the publishers, are vying for a slot on that limited book list.

Another thing taught to 101/102 English students is know and write to your audience, but this seems to be a lost concept to a lot of people. Probably because they have MBAs running their publishers who think that if they just get the combination of buzzwords right, they can make the square peg of Wall Street marketing speak fit into the round hole of selling content to an educated audience. Jabs aside, that quoted bit is a fair point. There was another recent thread with the obviously younger posters bemoaning the length and unnecessary wordiness of, for example, the Tolkein books. The older posters of course suggested that criticizing the favorite books of their adolescence was heresy.

What none of the replies pointed out, was that Tolkien's growing audience in the 1970s didn't have social media and 450 channels of shit on TV to choose from. As a wise man once said, they only had 15 channels of shit on tv to choose from. That would explain why overly criticized and poorly-written novels, by literary standards, are the ones that sell millions and get those big movie budgets these days. What few people in any business have a firm grasp of is their audience/customer. The ones that do tend to do well. The ones that don't..don't.

Nope but I've been known to enjoy specific editors who happen to work for a specific publisher.

I was going to ask this, too. The quote:

Consumers (readers), when facing the reality of having a desire to read a new book, but being unable to readily consume their favorite author, are known to review their preferred author’s publisher for other substitutes.

Way back in the dim mists of my youth, while dodging attacks by archaeopterix-bears, I can remember doing something like that. But that was when paperbacks had order forms in the back.

Nope

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