Having declared it too stupid to live, I suppose I should explain myself.
First, I am referring to that portion of the publishing industry that produces novels and non-fiction works intended for the mass audience. I am more specifically referring to books that consist primarly of text - in other words, NOT the lavish coffee-table color jobs, but just ordinary books.
A hard-bound book costs only about two dollars to mass-produce, even in modest quantity, yet such a book sells for $25 to $30 or more. Worse, it usually takes 18 months to get the bloody thing to market. Not the time to write it, this is the time after it's written!
Book publishing is a marketing game and a venture-capital game. Today, the cost of bringing a book to market is about as close to zero as one can expect. Desktop publishing software combined with fulfillment services offered by Amazon and others have made it trivially simple to cause a book to be available to potential buyers.
The trick - and the expense - is in making those potential buyers aware of the book. For this you need a marketing plan and a marketing budget. You will need to find and carry out ways of promoting the book - advertisements, reviews, author tours, etc. Yet this is the one area where traditional publishing houses do almost nothing for new authors. At best you get a wee bit of help setting up an author tour, but real cash expenditures? Sorry, no budget for that.
What do they do with the $20-plus of gross profit they make on a book? It certainly doens't wind up in the author's pocket.
What's needed is a separate and independent venture-capital backed model for book promotion. A group of interested investors pools enough money to do a good job of advertising and otherwise promoting the book (or a group of books). The proceeds from book sales are used to repay both the investors and the author, according to terms agreed to by them.
I think a model wherein the investors back a package of books, from several authors, and perhaps targeting different market segments and genres, would make the most sense. This spreads the risk around a bit. Thoughtful investor groups will develop consistent plans and models for promotion, and eventually even brand themselves. Thus, eventually a new sort of "publisher" will evolve, but this time a properly disintermediated one, able to sustain a business model going forward, instead of taking eighteen months to publish and then abandon a book.
