Originally, we saw a post on BoingBoing pointing to some commentary by John Green (Looking for Alaska, An Abundance of Katherines) on ways authors could think smarter about advances, along with continued thoughts along those lines, and we thought we might try to summarize them, but then we poked around Green’s site some more and found the video above, and we figured it would be a lot more fun.
Well, okay, we can’t resist throwing in one quote:
“Okay,” you say, “but publishers don’t behave rationally. If they behaved rationally, they wouldn’t be massively overcommitted to a business model that has failed so spectacularly that many of them would be in real danger of bankruptcy if they were not owned by gigantic media corporations that can absorb the losses.”
Oh, you. With your overlong and underpunctuated sentences, you could almost be me. But right, yes. This is very true. Do editors push books merely because they foolishly paid too much for them? Maybe somtimes. But am I the only person who worries that exploiting that irrationality for our short term gain is harming our business at the very moment of its greatest fragility?
Now take our word for it and go read the rest.