02-01-2010, 01:38 PM
Quote:I guess it is his ability to spin a goodstory that has helpednim have so many book published? Publisher pressure perhaps?Contrary to popular fiction, publishers are in business for one reason only: to turn a profit. To attain that goal you need to a) sell your product and b) don't spend too much making it. To get a) you need to have good reviews where they matter and a price people are willing to pay. For b) you want to avoid having lots of highly qualified staff. Printing is expensive, but compared to, say, paying fact-checkers, it's peanuts, especially if your print-run is large.
Military history has potentially a very large audience and therefore a huge number of potential readers (note: several 1000 is quite good) and buyers of your book. Do they read the Brywn Mayr review or equivalent academic reviews for other periods? No, if they read them, it's more likely in, eg, Military History magazine and the like. Are they forgiving about errors that only especially interested readers pick up on (such as RATers) if it's otherwise an excellent read? Yes, very. In other words: from a business point of view it makes good sense to get an author who knows how to spin a yarn. If the publisher's editor can catch an error without doing extra research and spending too much time on a book, fine, but why would you go to the trouble of hiring a specialist to double-check something if that forces you to either make a book more expensive (and risk lower sales) or keep the price low, but ruin your margins?
I think the only way to escape out of this problem is publishing critical reviews where they matter: in (digital) publications that have so much authority and such a large reach that they influence purchase behavior. Such publications have become very rare since the coming of the internet. And even then, the reviewer is left with a difficult problem. A book that's written for a non-specialist/academic audience needs to be accessible (reading is a hobby for most people, after all) without dumbing down, while keeping abreast of the latest specialist insights. Do you recommend a book that's very accessible, but has factual problems, or a badly written, but factually perfect book? The perfect combination may well be out of reach for most authors (within a reasonable amount of time) as well. It's a very difficult problem to solve.
