The big publishers rarely spend anything on marketing for most authors.
The most likely scenario if you get a tradpub deal is a $5k advance, an editing pass, and a cover. Considering those would cost you $1-2k do to yourself, that's not nothing. But they still pretty much expect you to spend your own time and money marketing. The exceptions are the books they try to force into being popular which are usually DIE garbage.
The real problem is the Big 4 editors have become totally ideologically captured and completely lost touch with the market. They have no idea what sells anymore. The publishers just put out flop after flop and hope one of them somehow becomes a hit. That's why Barns and Noble stopped stocking debut hardcovers. None of the trash sells. https://www.reddit.com/r/selfpublish/comments/wxl645/barnes_and_noble_makes_it_harder_for_debut/
On top of this is of course how almost every functional component of the industry is utterly compromised. Particularly reviewers, who at least in ages past occasionally got a few things right. But now it's purely ideological nepotism, along with corporate DEI investors and DEI funded consultant firms.
And all of this, combined with what was inevitably going eventually become an easily over-saturated global market, with an over abundance of "too much shit" shit for anyone to ever have the time to sift through. And then there's the mess that a lot of web-based content/publishing opportunities offer, which rarely yields profits or sales worth mentioning. It sucks especially if you just want your work to be appreciated, regardless of how little money it makes.
And even further on top of that is the ever decreasing interest in written literature, the advent of AI, etc.
Part of the problem is that there are just 4 big publishers. Consolidation down to the point where it’s possible for all of them to be reading from the same play book. If there were 1,000 publishers at least some of them would be on a different page
The big publishers rarely spend anything on marketing for most authors.
The most likely scenario if you get a tradpub deal is a $5k advance, an editing pass, and a cover. Considering those would cost you $1-2k do to yourself, that's not nothing. But they still pretty much expect you to spend your own time and money marketing. The exceptions are the books they try to force into being popular which are usually DIE garbage.
The real problem is the Big 4 editors have become totally ideologically captured and completely lost touch with the market. They have no idea what sells anymore. The publishers just put out flop after flop and hope one of them somehow becomes a hit. That's why Barns and Noble stopped stocking debut hardcovers. None of the trash sells. https://www.reddit.com/r/selfpublish/comments/wxl645/barnes_and_noble_makes_it_harder_for_debut/
On top of this is of course how almost every functional component of the industry is utterly compromised. Particularly reviewers, who at least in ages past occasionally got a few things right. But now it's purely ideological nepotism, along with corporate DEI investors and DEI funded consultant firms.
And all of this, combined with what was inevitably going eventually become an easily over-saturated global market, with an over abundance of "too much shit" shit for anyone to ever have the time to sift through. And then there's the mess that a lot of web-based content/publishing opportunities offer, which rarely yields profits or sales worth mentioning. It sucks especially if you just want your work to be appreciated, regardless of how little money it makes.
And even further on top of that is the ever decreasing interest in written literature, the advent of AI, etc.
Part of the problem is that there are just 4 big publishers. Consolidation down to the point where it’s possible for all of them to be reading from the same play book. If there were 1,000 publishers at least some of them would be on a different page