Heck, yeah.

Though at a certain point of low quality, I throw the thing against the wall and write my own.

(And before anyone thinks that’s snidely snarky, I add: “Get your mind out of the gutter! You’re blocking my periscope!”)

I would say that Weber is actually Baen Ground Zero. Bujold started with Wars In Space (and on alien planets, sortakinda) and sort of branched out all over the place from there; I wouldn’t actually think some of her later books would be things Baen would’ve taken as a first book. On the other hand, neither did Baen try to direct one of their golden geese back onto the “Straight and Narrow.” They pretty much trusted her to bring her fans along anywhere she wandered.

Flexibility and theme-building… The publishers who’ve lost that have lost something valuable.

I used to see the occasional copy of these versions in used book stores. (I haven’t seen their ads in a couple decades.) Collectors consider them barely a step or two above those ubiquitous Reader’s Digest books, & the bookstores often priced these printings accordingly. (They were hardbound copies, so they weren’t entirely worthless.)

However, the number of these second-tier classics might be large, but they were finite; after a point, they would need to publish works which needed to be marketed. A lot more readers fluent in English are familiar with the names of medieval poets than, say, the classics of Urdu or Swahili. Most of the Penguin Classics titles I can recall are translations from European languages with a few from Chinese & Japanese.

Short of some scholarly excitement for little-known Thai or Romanian authors of the 19th century spilling over into the general population, I doubt we’ll see many more Penguin Classics; from what I’ve read, the costs of translating a book — especially for exotic languages — is far higher than buying the rights to a new one, so there’s no incentive to add new titles to that imprint.

Our large industry group just got around, two-plus years ago, to announcing that “an ebook is a book”. One wonders how long it will take them to realize “a self published book is a book.”

The post didn’t come right out and say, “See, quality is why you need trad publishers, and publishers are why you need agents!” But it was there in subtext. Ms. Lawton is one of the group trying to convince writers to help hold back the tide.

But the people who buy books? Unless it’s Harlequin or a very few other genre specific brands (like the publisher of Dungeons and Dragons books, stuff like that), buyers/readers don’t care much about who the publisher is.

My wife buys a ton of ebooks, and she couldn’t tell you the difference between Random House and Simon & Schuster if you offered her a $100,000 cash and 20 lbs of permanent fat loss no matter what she ate.

Could a publisher decide to specialize in, say, thrillers and develop a brand around it the way Harlequin has with romance? Sure. And if someone does, they will make good money and be a great business to own longterm if it’s a genre with longevity (mystery, thriller, romance, biographies, history, etc.)

The blog comments appear to come from a large number of other Literary agents, and industry insiders. The thinking feels like 2010 thinking. One comment questioned if there were readers who actually dared to avoid traditionally published books and only look for self-published books, gasp.

They appear to be completely unaware of the size and scope that indie publishing as how achieved, and probably totally unaware that this little blog entry was picked up here at the Passive Voice.

They seem to believe they are doctors who are going to cure the patient with some new treatment.

I believe this is an autopsy. The overwhelming evidence appears to indicate that the victim (traditional publishing) died from self-inflicted wounds.