Ignoring the reality of book publishing

TLDR - Money matters.

Lost the thread on FB but invested too much time in this to just toss it. It is about the world of traditional book publishing. If you are thinking about writing a book, here ya go.

This is gonna make some people mad. As I frequently say, if the truth hurts, yer living wrong.

Lemme speak to this as a publisher, a person who buys words other people write. I am also a 30+ year veteran judge of the Benjamin Franklin Book Awards. And yes, I also write books. I also own a bookstore, am the editor for an international magazine and co-own 3 other businesses.

What I see in a lot of these comments is a missing element. Traditional book publishers exist for one reason - to make money. They have a proven formula to do this. They know what sells. They know what will not sell.

Do they make mistakes? Sure. They sometimes publish a bomb. They sometimes reject an author who then goes elsewhere and becomes a best seller. These rare exceptions, call them aberrations, happen in every business everywhere. You can easily find a list of the rejected works that turned into monumental hits.

Betcha can't find a similar list of books the traditional publishers tried and lost big money on. Lemme give you a hand with one example - Billie Eilish by Billie Eilish. Crash and burn! Samuel Clemens was a stunning author. As a businessman, he was a stunning author. He lost a fortune in the publishing company he created. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/736554

Lowering standards, easier access, getting an agent etc etc etc to open the doors to more authors are all grand ideas. Somebody has to pay for it. Who? People who buy books. Publishers, editors, agents, press men, etc etc etc got bills, yo. The ROI is simply not there.

So about those Ben Franklin Awards (self published or independent publisher). Each year, I get between 10 and 50 books to judge. I can generally count on 1 or 2 of those books being good enough for a traditional publisher. Depending on the category, it could be none. I can definitely count on about 25% of the entries being so bad it makes me want to go down to my farm and set fire to the timber so the trees cannot be harvested to make paper that could be used to print more of those books.

The rest? Eh.Don't quit your day job. Good idea, mediocre execution. I simply don't see enough in the author's work to believe the writer could turn the book into a money maker.

If you are still with me, I have talked people OUT of self publishing too. 98% of self pub books do not make enough money to recover the author's cost of producing the book. Me bud Ang is one of these people. She wanted to do a cookbook (and Ang can COOK!) What she did not want to do is market her book.

Self publishing requires the author to market, market, market. If you cannot invest significant time in trying to sell your book, it won't sell. Another bud Susan self pubbed and had monumental success. The work she had to put into it gave her a nervous breakdown and landed her in a mental ward for a while. She talked about that in a later book.