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Message: <blockquote data-quote="guildofblades" data-source="post: 3448475" data-attributes="member: 27324">>>If you take the guy who normally ships your packages, answers your phones and does your billing, sit him down at a desk for 8 hours and have him proofread 4 chapters of the next book you are shipping, you are losing the cost of whatever 8 hours of his normal work is worth to you. You are NOT re-paying the entire cost of his employment because you'd be paying for taxes, insurance, work space, accounting, vacation and benefits for that employee anyway.<<Um, you sure are. You take an employee off shipping and order processing, printing, writing or whatever you had them doing, ten that becomes work that is not getting done. You then have to either hire someone to do that instead or you have to ask your existing employees to work longer hours which either means you are paying overtime rates by the end of the week if they are hourly, or your salaried employees simply start to get less pleased about the company they work for it they have to work an extra 8 hours a week on a regular basis (And disgruntled salaried employees can lead to loss in many other ways).For most publishers it is simply boiling down to a matter of perceived consumer priorities and the assignment of limited resources that need to be maximized in order to turn a profit on low volume niche industry products. You can try and twist the math any number of ways, but 2+2+2 simply will not equal 9 now matter how many times you count it.The drive in recent years to require hard cover products, full color interiors, full color artwork, fancier graphical book layouts and more advertising and marketing expenses to maintain a presence within the distribution network has all led to a changed priority in the funding for aspects of product development. The current consensus tends to be that colorful hard covers, flashy artwork and pre launch buzz marketing are all too essential to ignore as a publisher and to do those things well comes with a lot of cost and those fund must come from somewhere. Without an increase in overall sales, logic dictates it must come from reduced overhead (and you can only reduce overhead so much) and other areas of product development.....you know, things like writing costs, research and development, play testing, editing, etc.I hear you that editing is important to you. And it is obvious it is important to other people as well. I am just saying that for the average publisher the sales and revenues simply aren't there to put the total resources into every area of product development that would be absolutely ideal. It becomes a choice of prioritization for each publisher and generally of 5-8 important design and production points, most successful publishers will manage to hit all but one or two of them. But its nigh to impossible to hit them all.Ryan S. JohnsonGuild of Blades Publishing Group<a href="http://www.guildofblades.com" target="_blank">http://www.guildofblades.com</a><a href="http://www.1483online.com" target="_blank">http://www.1483online.com</a><a href="http://www.thermopylae-online.com" target="_blank">http://www.thermopylae-online.com</a></blockquote>

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