If there isn't enough hassles tring to get published in the children's book market, now we have to contend with Celebrities doing their worst to ruin the lists. I've yet to see a decent book from any Celebrity. Hard words but more made from the frustration that publishers are willing to print their crap unedited.
The upside to having them out there for us to laugh at not with, is that they make us look incredibly talented. Many readers in the US are now realising these vanity published Celebrities will only ever see their tripe published once. And with a very high price on the book purely for scrapping left overs. I never knew why books cost so much until I asked a friend at a major publisher here in Sydney, the answer was they build in a cost to the retail price for scrapping the unsold books. So (and this is from memory) the price of $19.95 in retail has a tag of around $6.00 set aside to cover the cost of shredding those unsold. Technically if you could publish according to pre-sales only and printed the sold amount it would reduce your cost by one third or more. Amazon has a brilliant strategy that not many realise. They are monitoring sales and building a list of people to sell to using their many tools that we think are cool as they help us find what we want or make suggestions. All the while they are making headway in to what could be called Direct Publishing. Imagine being able to pre order Episode 3 or maybe 10 of Star Wars by George Lucas well in advance. Amazon would be able to gauge the reaction of pre orders and then prompt the writer with an advance from pre orders up front to write the book. They could then publish the exact number of books to meet orders. This will change book publishing over the next few years.
That's very interesting. I'm about to start post-grad in editing and publishing.
I'm appalled by the amount of celebrity pap that's on the market. Sophie Dahl's effort is a case in point. That girl should just go back to being fat and on the runway.
I only saw the Sophie Dahl book recently and filcked through it. Not worth the effort. It was very disappointing to see the publisher assign an illustrator to try and emulate the winning combination of Dahl and Quentin Blake. I'm a fan of Blake and this illustrator did a worthy job but made it look pathetic by the connections made.
Hope I didn't scare you off with my other rant on editors. I deal with them all the time and they vary so drastically.
I hope the course goes well for you. I expect perfect A's and a few complimentary cartoons well placed in your assignments.
Hehehe!! Sounds good to me!
And don't worry about criticising editors. Trust me, after working as a journo for several years, my hide become pretty thick! In a good way, of course! :)