Of course. My simplistic perception is that they fall somewhere on a continuum, for good and/or bad, between Big Five and self-pub. Like self-pub, e-book pub, e-first, niche / small publishers, Big Five.
There isn't a continuum. For some books and writers, the Big Five is the best option. For others, small publishers. Some are better suited to self publishing. And so on. It all depends on the writer and the book.
Of course I believe you should never go with vanity publishing, because the companies in that business make money whether or not your book sells, so they have little incentive to serve your customers well.
Agreed.
Some people choose to DIY those things too. I think I could edit my own book. I'm good enough at grammar and punctuation to have few mistakes. Marketing is something I wouldn't try, because I know from experience I'm not a pro or world-class amateur at getting people to like me. Some people are, and for them self-publishing might be successful.
As others have already said, you don't seem to understand what editing involves. It's much more than grammar and punctuation. And the big problem for self publishers isn't marketing, it's distribution, which is a whole other issue.
Yes, I meant print as synecdoche for all that publishers do. The hardest to replicate, for me, is the marketing and distribution.
Distribution is the biggie.
If a big publisher believes in your book, they can put out a million-dollar ad campaign and make sure there is a copy or two in every B&N. That will give you a good chance that a million people will at least crack your book before buying, and if you have a decent hook, then your book will sell more copies than a self-published masterpiece.
You're very unlikely to get that huge ad campaign, but getting a few copies of your book into every B&N (or Waterstones in the UK, etc) is huge. It not only gets you bookshop sales, it gets you online sales too. So it affects sales of your e-books too.
There's nothing wrong with publishers carving up the marketplace. The problem is if after they all claim their little territory, there is a vast space of good books that many people would want to read not served by any publisher.
I don't think there are vast spaces which trade publishers aren't occupying; I do think there are more good books written than they can reasonably publish, and many of those are now finding their readers through other means, such as self publishing.
Can you teach me this trick? How do I identify publishers who print or agents who represent books like mine? I suppose one answer is to identify publishers who have published books like mine, but my point is, there are no books exactly like mine, and if there are books quite a lot like mine, I haven't found them. So I think the best I could do would be to find a publisher who publishes books somewhat like mine, and is fairly open-minded.
You find those publishers and agents by finding books like yours. They don't have to be exactly like yours--in fact, you wouldn't want them to be, because then there's no reason for them to take yours--but they have to be
like yours. So, similar genre, length, tone, and so on. And all publishers are open-minded when it comes to signing brilliant books: you don't have to worry on that regard.
You do have to ensure that your book is really good, though. Because if it isn't, it'll just disappear into the heap of other quite-good books which fill up the slush piles.
Of course. But some businesses prefer to avoid risks, and try to never publish a single title that they will spend more money on than they make.
All publishers that I've worked for do all they can to only publish the books they'll make money on. During acquisitions meetings we focus on every aspect of the books we're looking at: editing and production costs, likely sales, marketing plans, acquisition costs, rights sales, everything.
Sometimes, if a book is good enough, we'll offer on it even though we suspect it won't sell in high number because we have faith that the writer will build on that book and do well. Sometimes we'll offer a ridiculously high amount because it's a book we are determined to have on our lists (a celebrity book, perhaps, or a book by a very well-known writer). But yep, we will take the riskier books if we think they're good enough, and here "good enough" has a number of meanings.
It's not that they've discovered there's not a market, it's that they haven't proven there is a market, and they aren't willing to try.
This is very rarely the case. Specialist publishers, like HMB, are never going to risk their money on an SF title, for example: they just wouldn't. But the broader lists do it all the time. Honest.
I wonder what you consider a risky title?
It's also possible to stay in business if half your books are flops and half your books are hits.
It would be very difficult. Most publishers work on a very low profit margin: a few percentage points only. If half the titles they publish lose money, they have to start sacking people.
Probably even with a worse ratio, since a hit might make 1000% profit, but a flop can never make more than 100% loss. If there aren't publishers with that business model, then there is an untapped market, and it makes sense for people to go into business for themselves.
When a book loses all of its investment, the publisher has to sell a LOT of books to recoup that lost money because the profit margins in publishing are so very low.
I bet it isn't. You can obviously write coherent, reasonably-punctuated sentences, and form a decent argument. This puts you ahead of most of the books I've seen in the slush pile.
No, I mean what, if anything, changes the game so that self-publishing is more viable now than in the past. It's always been possible to self-publish, but before the digital age, because of setup costs, there was a minimum number of copies of a book required to be profitable. Now it's almost as cheap to print a million different books as a million copies of the same book. If a million different people read those million different books, and then ten of those people read each of the top 10% reviewed of those, and so on, the cream has the potential to rise to the top. Of course, I don't believe we're quite there yet, because I think people are still more likely to choose a book they see an ad for than to randomly choose among unsung books that have few, but positive reviews.
Digital books have made self publishing far easier. It's great. However, the rise of online sales have made it much harder for individual books, those quirky, risky books we were discussing earlier, to be discovered. When we bought books mostly from bookshops all we'd need was a good bookseller, who would stock those quirky books and hand sell them; now we need them to somehow surface in a huge pond of books, which is much harder and more random. I miss good bookshops, I miss finding treasures from little presses displayed among the books from bigger presses. Those good bookshops are still around, of course, and the treasures are still there: but they're much harder to find now.
That's similar to people who start micropublishers to publish themselves. I've both self-produced and self-published, and the feel of it is strikingly similar.
