It seems to me that the worst publishing offense is just what your original post describes: A publisher will reject a project because of a personal prejudice without even minimal effort to evaluate the work. DGLM has a long list of enormously successful projects across many genres, so casually rejecting a project is just arrogant and ignorant. If they treat you that way imagine how hard it is for a new agent with a new author in a small genre. I probably suffer from being too well mannered, but if a first rate agent brought me a project I would be embarassed not to read the entire book and think about it for a week before reluctantly declining.

A steady stream of new product is required for agents and publishers alike so why spend so little effort in finding quality work? It seems to me that in this uncertain time more effort should be made to seek and evaluate new works rather than less.

And now for a provocative question: How many of the problems in publishing originate from the inbred nature of the business and its concentration in New York?

I came across this blog by happenstance, but I keep reading it because you ask the most interesting questions.

The biggest area publishers are screwing up is backlist. I now own all my backlist, over 40 titles. For many years I desperately tried to get a publisher to understand that breaking out my latest title, would lead to breaking out my backlist and make both of us a lot of money. But publishers viewed backlist as something that had its shot and failed– and somehow they seemed to think it was because of the book and the author, not their own lack of marketing.

I now have two of the top ten titles in science fiction on UK and US Kindle. 11 of the top 50 on Kindle in War, outselling even W.E.B. Griffin. All of this from my backlist which ‘failed’. This failed backlist generated over $100,000 of sales in July.

I’m pretty happy that publishers’ lack of foresight has given me this great opportunity now.

The contracted view of publishing that you describe is bad for authors, bad for agents and bad for the public. You’re right to call them out.

What agent doesn’t want to find an author who they believe will sell a million copies to a million people who **already follow** that undiscovered talent’s blog AND buy their books? The hard work of building a readership/following is done before the client even signs on.

The problem with that is that the ideal platform you hear agents talk doesn’t lend itself across all genres. It would also be very difficult to pull off without some name recognition and a back list. That being the case, the author platform is very unfriendly to unpublished writers, and nearly impossible to build if an author has zero writing credentials. Never mind that most genre writers don’t even need to build a platform. Instead, they need to focus on branding themselves in their chosen genre, and work on building a readership – even if it’s only with free stories.

Despite what the platform pushers say, at the end of the day, most readers couldn’t care less about an author’s promotional/marketing strategy. Most readers don’t care how many twitter followers an author has. They don’t care if you’ve given 50 keynote speeches, or if you have a press kit. Most don’t care if you’ve won a national writing award. On the other hand, they DO want to know [first thing] what genre you write in, what your book is about, and where it’s available. By and large, to the reader, it’s the story that matters.

Building an author platform and author branding are two different marketing strategies, and some agents come at it as if it’s the same thing. It’s not. One reason a reader **might possibly care** about an author’s platform is if the book in question is non-fiction material that may need to be checked, or referenced. The author him/herself becomes important because of the “content” of their book. It’s no longer just about the story, but about the author’s qualifications. None of that matters with genre fiction. In that case, it’s about building a following of readers who like to read the type of books you write.

I think that’s where the confusion comes in about when and why a platform is needed. At the core of it, agents want a ready-made big seller, and sadly, there are no guarantees in this market.

Even so, I am against self-publishing. I believe it’s diluting the market with poorly written and unedited dross, and it’s unfair to the readers who can’t tell the difference at the point of sale.