Publishers' dilemma


From the Guardian:

All of which raises the question: just what is the role of "traditional publishing". Aside from readers and writers, publishing is made of middlemen, with retail mediators on the one hand and arbiters of taste and merit on the other. Publishers, however, don't just select titles to commission, most hone and polish them relentlessly. Add that to marketing and publicity and you might feel that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with this model until, that is, you introduce it to the less-than-gentlemanly, cut-throat world of 21st-century retail and realise that is where the muddle creeps in.

 

Publishing, as a whole, hasn't really been keeping up. Giving in to demands for ever-greater discounts from supermarkets, the high-street chains and Amazon in order to get stock moving and push the unit price down, they have in the process been voluntarily chiselling away at the royalty rates of their authors.

Full story here.

The line about honing books is a bit quaint, and would definitely be in the eyes of some beholders. (Publishers aren't doing much to build the next generation of editors, considering their salaries, but that's a topic for another time.) The article does lay out the key points of the present situation.