Presented without implied indorsement

[james_davis_nicoll]

Because I have no idea if the following is true or not.

David Drake on Robert Jordan

I'm inclined to be at least a little skeptical when he says I further said and will repeat: there were quite a lot of people who sneered at 'Robert Jordan' but whose own books wouldn't have been published without the Wheel of Time to subsidize them. Since the onset of Jim's (Jim Rigney's) illness, he hadn't been able to write--and a lot of those people are not being published any more.

The thing is, publishing is a horrible darwinian battleground, especially for writers, and over any given interval a large subset of mid-listers will find that their careers have come to an end. It wouldn't particularly surprise me if Tor's total number of titles per year stayed roughly constant at the same time that the mix of authors changed.

[Added later: titles per year should be easy enough to check. More later]

Comments

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

Sure, but how "sellable" is sellable?

Do they want 10% margin or a 20% margin, overall. If a few tentpoles cover most of that margin, and one collapses...

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

If I didn't come from a nation that does most of its trading with an unstable and declining republic, I'd comment here about the wisdom of relying on too few sources of income.

[pats-quinade.livejournal.com]

I'd never even heard of softwood lumber until I came up here...

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Were you around for the time Mulroney put the Americans in their place for softwood taxes by slapping an import duty on books imported into Canada? No, I have no idea what he was smoking.

[change of subject]

I wonder how much impact it would have made if BM had made books GST-exempt?

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

Sure, sure. Of course, then there is that old joke about the accountant to explains to the publisher, "See, some of your books lose money. Some make a little money. And a few are bestsellers, and that's where 90% of your profit comes from! Really, instead of publishing ten losers, ten winners, and two bestsellers, you should really just publish twenty-two bestsellers a year."

And the publisher says "Gee, why didn't I think of that?"

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

We had a bookchain up here that only sold best-sellers. In fact, I think that they were called Bestsellers. I don't see them around anymore, at least in KW.

[(Anonymous)]

At least in Ottawa, Bestsellers morphed into selling videos and then DVDs, with a small rack of paperbacks (the type sold in drug stores or convenience stores).