"Traditional book publishing with thousands of publishers worked pretty well from 1960 to 1995 and then it just fell apart. Those good years are where the myths built up. Now in the last 30 years, traditional publishing and its four publishers has become a sad little echo of the thousands of publishers that came before."
Full article here.
One of the commentators to the above post (Steve Perry) wrote: "Trad-pub peaked, I think, just before the Great Recession of 2007-2009, that took with it the traditional publishing midlist and the careers of a shitload of writers."
I have to join in and say this entirely mirrors my own experience. The midlist (the place for quirky interesting books, often nonfiction) started dying around 1995, when all the mainstream publishing went fishing for potential bestsellers, leaving everything else behind. University presses tried to pick up the slack, but what they pay is risible, so most authors sensibly didn't go that route.
With the 2007-2009 crash, all publishers tightened their purse strings, and pushed a lot of good writers, who didn't sell according to bestseller standards, out of the marketplace. Within a few years, a writer had to be a heavy self-promoter (on all the social medias) to get a publisher in New York to listen to their proposals, and publishing decisions increasingly were ruled by the marketing departments, who nixed everyone without large a social media presence. It really has become depressing: why do all the work so that a publisher can take all the rights and the money (throwing pennies toward the author), dumbing something down in order to appeal to idiots? I speak of course of the non-fiction market. If publishers treated writers fairly, I'd have a lot more entries in my bibliography. As it stands, it's just not worth all the effort.
