In a previous post I set out to explain the way in which big publishers operated and why this gave literary agents so much power. In essence, big publishers work on a model that predicts just a handful of titles making excessive profits in any given year. Publishers accept that most titles will make little, if any, profit and it is the handful of ’successful’ titles which support the business. Since it is next to impossible to predict which titles will sell, publishers need to release a range of books, taking a scatter gun approach to finding the hits.
