Friday, November 17, 2006

Getting Bleaker...

I'm slowly beginning to understand why, in spite of the fact that several small publishers still insist on only looking at 'agented work', independent publishers no longer feature in the scheme of things for many literary agents. Not only can these publishers not afford the kind of advances agents expect for the work they put in, they are finding it more and more difficult to get their books into the shops, if this link is anything to go by.

Thanks (I think!) to Debi for the link.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

We're small (I run Snowbooks, a small indie publisher) but we still pay the sums that the chains require, because there's little point in publishing fiction if we can't get it into the promos - nothing else gives a novel the visibility it needs to get picked up by sufficient readers to pay the print etc bills. Thankfully retailers rate cards don't start at £10,000 but include some gentler figures, which means we can still get entry into a front of store promotion without breaking the bank. I actually don't find the rate-card the biggest hurdle: there are a finite number of slots and so our books tend to be competing on their merits, which is quite good really.

Elizabeth Baines said...

This very good to know!