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AlbertCory

I've asked a number of agents online for two numbers:

1) How many unsolicited queries have you received, in whatever time period you like: month, quarter, year, forever?

2) How many turned into published books?

None will provide that data, but I strongly suspect that the answer to #2 is "zero."

They'll happily quote you BS quantities, like "a bunch" or "a handful."

So as this article says, they spend their time chasing celebrities, online influencers, and friends of friends. And not making a whole lot of money anyway.

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I don't think this is what the article says at all. It says that publishers make all their money celebrities and the backlist, and that those titles pay for all the midlist titles, most of which don't recoup their advances.

It's not like publishers can simply decide to focus on new and midlist authors. The books that sell, sell. The top line of this article is well described by its title.

No, you're quite mistaken. The agents try to divine what the publishers want, which is, as you said, "celebrities [and the backlist], and that those titles pay for all the midlist titles, most of which don't recoup their advances."

> It's not like publishers can simply decide to focus on new and midlist authors

who said anything about what they should or shouldn't do?

But since you brought it up: the same applies to the music business, as Ted Gioia (my original source). At one time in history, everyone in the music business was focused on selling more music, so nurturing and promoting new artists was good business. They didn't simply look at "what are people buying now?"

I have what the article says to go on, and the article contradicts you. But I know a bit more about the music industry, and it is absolutely the case that midlist music acts don't --- and never did --- generate enough record sales to cover their nut. There's a famous Steve Albini zine article that indicts the recording industry for never recouping an advance, and a less famous David Lowery article that explains why nobody could reasonably expect any of these titles to recoup.

It may be that we don't disagree at all, and are just talking past each other? At any rate: my only point here is, like startup investing and the music industry, we're talking about a hits business. And they aren't hits businesses because a cabal of cigar-chomping executives wants them to be that; they're that way because the median investment never recoups, and so the winners have to pay for the losers.

We're done here. Trolls get one answer, and you've had yours.

Just in case it's helpful: I think you're going to find this approach to dealing with disagreements on HN isn't going to work out to your benefit, or to the benefit of whatever point you're trying to make.

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You used to pitch your book to publishers. Now you pitch your audience.

That's always been the case; it's merely a proxy for likely sales. It used to be that audience was demonstrated by previous sales; now it can be proved by being a celebrity, twitch/twitter/instagram/whatever followers, etc.

I think that's true, actually.

this is true for non-fiction for sure

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