“Think of it like a supply chain,” said one publishing executive who would not speak for attribution. “If the newspapers have fewer ads, they’re running fewer book reviews, so therefore, for those books that don’t have a pre-established audience, there are fewer opportunities to appeal to the consumer. Therefore, there are fewer of those consumers going into the bookstore. The bookstore recognizes this, and they tell you your mid-list books aren’t doing shit, so they’re not gonna order them, or they’re just gonna order 100 copies. They can cut off those books, and then the publisher is faced with a tough decision—how am I gonna buy those books that I know I can only ship 100 copies of? What am I gonna do? Am I gonna keep doing it? Or am I gonna spend more [money] chasing established authors?”
Emphasis added by me.
What a sorry lot of eejits.
When I began this blog, I had more than 100 people reading it the first day.
And they can't sell 100 copies of what they're allegedly expert in -- books?
Hell, I could sell 100 of a fanzine back in the day.
Even more pathetic:
Could it be that the structural obsolescence everyone’s been crowing about for the past decade—defeat at the hands of digital media, Amazon.com, etc.—would have been less painful than this, or at least more world-historically meaningful? What lies ahead instead is a necessary scaling back of ambition: an age in which the gambling spirit that has kept book publishing exciting gives way to a shabby, predictable environment that cows its participants into avoiding all things adventurous and allowing only the proven few a seat at the table.
Emphasis added by me.
That makes Hollywood with its inflated budgets sound absolutely entrepreneurial in comparison! Look at how David Lynch, for example, went from a midnight movie -- Eraserhead -- to directing the mainstream Mel Brooks-produced The Elephant Man. And this still goes on today!
Writers are going to be faced with a choice: The dying dinosaurs of print or direct publishing via eBooks.
Go with eBooks.
The future of the dying dinosaurs of print is to be souvenir peddlers.
-- Via Twitter from KatMeyer
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