It seems so... unliterary. But publishing houses despise authors and are doing everything they can to make their lives miserable. Here's why.
Authors are admittedly a strange lot. There's something antisocial about retreating from life for months or years at a time, to perform the solitary act of writing a book.
On top of that, authors are flaky. They promise to deliver a manuscript in April and it doesn't come in until October. Or the following April. Or the April after that. This leaves publishers with several options, all of them bad: revise publishing schedules at the last minute; demand that authors turn in projects on time, regardless of quality; cancel books altogether; or sue the authors (as Penguin has begun to do) for undelivered or poor quality work.
Authors are also prickly about their work. There are few jobs on the planet in which people are utterly free to ignore the guidance, or even mandates, from their bosses. Yet book authors are notoriously dismissive of their editors' advice. When I was writing novels for Simon & Schuster back in the late 1980s, my editor, Bob Asahina, used to tell me, "You're the only writer who ever lets me do my job."
Also, annoyingly, writers expect to be paid. Maybe not much, but something. The Authors Guild produced a survey in the 1970s indicating that writers earned only slightly more, on an hourly basis, than did the fry cooks at McDonald's. Publishers were still responsible for paying advances to authors, hoping that the authors would turn in a publishable manuscript -- which doesn't happen all of the time.
So it's understandable that publishers might feel churlish and uncharitable toward authors, on whom their entire publishing model depends. But since the 2008 economic meltdown hit Publishers Row, the enmity has turned into outright warfare.
Full piece at HuffPost
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