A familiar business model

This article in the Guardian makes MacMillan's new no advance for new writers program sound an awful lot like Publish America.

Part of the objection is that traditionally an advance provides publishers with an incentive to market a book; they must sell many copies to earn out the advance. Conventionally, the smaller the advance, the less effort put into shifting books.

"I feel reluctant to pass judgment from on high," said Deborah Rogers, director of the literary agency Rogers Coleridge and White. "But what worries me is where are these books going to land in a bookshop? To make any book work you've got to support it."

According to Barnard: "We won't be spending as much on marketing and promotion as on novels that have had big advances; but we believe we can find new ways of promoting and selling these books." He said the books would appear in the main Pan Macmillan catalogue and would be "very posh books" with ribbon markers, sold at £15. He expected them to become "collectors' items".

Hmm, listing the books in a catalogue to market them, selling them at a high price and expecting them to become collector's items, that sounds a lot like Publish America to me.

We know that writers should be writing, right? Writers should not be selling their books. (Never mind this article from Publish America called "DEATH OF A WRITER, BIRTH OF A SALESMAN") Marketing is the job of the publisher. And look at this:

"There are literally tens of thousands of writers out there - and we have a responsibility to help them. We can't do that by paying a half million advance to every author."

That is a quote from Michael Barnard. It's rather disingenuous considering that the median advance for the Sci Fi Fantasy author is $5000. It's enough to make me scream the way this MacMillan executive takes something low and dresses it up like a good deed.

Ugh now I have a pounding headache and I want to throw up. Other people say it makes me sick and it doesn't quite manifest the same way...