[Cue sarcastic missive along the lines of “like, OMG!”]
What brings this reaction on? A couple of things. First, Nicholas Clee’s massively long article about how and why the midlist is dying off in Britain, detailed almost excruciatingly:
One agent was talking about a client, a tyro novelist. The agent had sold–not to Orion–the novelist’s first two books for £75,000. Both he and the novelist were entitled to feel happy with that deal: surely they were on their way. The first novel sold 18,000 copies in paperback: not enough to cover the advance, but a figure that beats those achieved by many authors who have gone on to bestselling success. Nevertheless, the publisher has already written off its investment. It is giving no promotional support to the second novel.
“The author’s at work on his third,” the agent said. “I haven’t the heart to tell him not to bother.” The current publisher will not throw good money after–in its view–bad; other houses, noting the author’s record, will stay away.
The rest is all standard fare: sales & marketing taking hold, conglomerates merging with each other, all that jazz. Look, we know it sucks, so what’s going to be done? But it’s so much easier to state known facts…
Which is kind of what US News & World Report does in their cover story on the fallout from fake memoirs and how it’s actually taking away from what changes are *really* affecting the publishing industry: declining readership, rise of technology and how the long-tail theory might — gasp — revitalize the midlist again.