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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

The one experience I have with going through (a respected technical) publisher is that, relative to self-publishing, the primary benefit was that a lot of people took it as a bit of a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval with respect to book signings, reputational enhancement, etc. But the advance was pretty trivial and the editorial/marketing support was very limited.

It also imposed a lot of restrictions on pricing, length, and free distribution.

Obviously people do well by publishers but IMO it's hard to make a case that they're the vitally important gatekeepers they once were. YMMV of course.

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I started https://shepherd.com about a year ago, so I talk to a ton of authors, and what blows me away is how no publishers do ANY marketing. This is such a weird industry and so weirdly broken.

If you get a huge upfront payment, they will do some marketing, of course, as they need to try to recoup their investment. But if you are not one of the top .01% of authors, they are just spinning a wheel to see if the decapitated chicken hits Yahtzee.

Yep, and how so many publishers want your own platform stats. I know people with large insta followings getting book deals purely because they can market their own books and cost publishers next to nothing, with an almost guaranteed profit. I hope the broken publishing system is destroyed by these same people realising they can do it all themselves - then perhaps the publishers can rise from the ashes and actually add true value.

Right, and this is basically an admission of their own uselessness. They'll only help you if you can prove you don't need the help. They're rent-seekers at this point.

To be fair, it is a hard problem. In the visual arts, you can tell if someone is talented immediately. With authors, especially in fiction, there's about a 12-hour commitment before one even knows if they know how to begin, carry, and finish a story. Literary agents, who are supposed to be the gatekeepers, are beyond useless at it (although it is worthwhile to get one, if you can, because you need one to be a serious player in traditional publishing).

That's what happens when you can get a huge amount of content for cheap. Pay a $1500 advance, do some light editing, publish and sit back and see what happens.

But yeah, marketing is basically you're in the catalog of (in my case) a technical book publisher and maybe you're included as part of some digital subscriptions. But even for more popular works, you're probably mostly not going on book signing tours or having a bunch of review copies sent out. You'll have to hire a PR agency for that and pay any costs out of your own pocket for the most part.

What I've written has been good for me but mostly because I'm not trying to directly make money off it. If I had been naive enough to think I'd be getting meaningful royalty checks that valued my time more than a few dollars an hour I expect I'd be disappointed.

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