I think it's actually a good thing that's happening. It's ending a bottleneck that's existed since the 1980s with consolidation. They need to compete - and before the 80s, they could have. There were so many different publishers with different editorial slants, styles, themes, lines that things were pretty good and no one expected it to be a fast-profit business.
My guess is that the big six are suffering one of the great ills common to large corporations today - overpaid CEOs draining the company resources away from producing good products. It's been some years now that editors have been overworked in the same way teachers are, just too many authors to work with to give each of them the time and effort to do a good job at the job. Great that more titles are being published again and that SFF has become so mainstream, but with the kind of contracts and low advances offered it's getting too ugly.
Self publishing was always done and there are a lot of classics that got self published. If readers decide, quality does make a good profit.
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winterfish
no subject
Date: 2012-06-19 05:12 pm (UTC)My guess is that the big six are suffering one of the great ills common to large corporations today - overpaid CEOs draining the company resources away from producing good products. It's been some years now that editors have been overworked in the same way teachers are, just too many authors to work with to give each of them the time and effort to do a good job at the job. Great that more titles are being published again and that SFF has become so mainstream, but with the kind of contracts and low advances offered it's getting too ugly.
Self publishing was always done and there are a lot of classics that got self published. If readers decide, quality does make a good profit.