For clarity’s sake, the exception years where when things like the Wednesday Letters and Fablehaven were doing beaucoup sales for Shadow Mountain. And now that SM is getting as conservative as the rest of DB, they’re back in the red.

Again, I don’t have documentation, but I will say that from my perspective, this is much better than a mere rumor. But since I’m not sharing my source, I agree that to everyone else, a rumor is what it is.

Hmmmm. I wonder if I could work my mole into getting me scans…. I doubt it, but would that be interesting?

Since I’ve already written a response elsewhere on this, I may try to address whether or not the Church could ever successfully sell Deseret Book in a post.

I will say here that, given that such information isn’t public and hasn’t been confirmed as true, I have my doubts about how important this could be. Are these substantial losses? ones that affect the ability of the company to exist? Are them more than 10% of sales? or less than 1%? Do the losses come mostly from the bookstores? or from the publishing operations?

To be very honest, without more detail, even if this rumor were confirmed, it is hard to guess what effect it might have. If the losses are bad, however, the first think I would expect to see is layoffs, and, if things are really, really bad in the bookstores, store closings.

But, we don’t have the information to say if that is possible or not.

Theric has learned from an anonymous source that DB has not turned a profit recently. I don’t know his source and have no reason to believe or disbelieve the assertion above. Absent any documented proof, any commentary on this assertion is just that — commentary. And without full access to the DB balance sheet, any speculations about where the problems are is simply guesswork.

Kent (46) —

DB might well be incompetent. I just learned that, with just a couple recent exceptions (now past), DB has fails to make a profit nearly every year.

The problem can simply be finding a partner willing to do the non-traditional structure you want. It can be hard because even outside of your partner, others will get an idea of how its suppossed to work and force your arrangement into a particular structure that is more like what they expect.

[For example, if you have a distributor that is selling, but not shipping, that could cause problems with your customers, who are expecting the traditional arrangement -- they might reject shipments from you because they expect them from the distributor!]

If you know the industry well, many things are possible and are done from time to time.

Its kind of like what I once read about design. Good design is knowing all the rules, and breaking at least one. Something similar can be said of structuring partnerships. You ned to first know all the rules — your expectations and those of your prospective partner and those of the industry and environment. Then you can break a rule, because you know the effect of breaking that rule.

While I’m quite a critic of DB, I don’t think they are incompetent, and I suspect they are better than what most first-time self published authors can pull off. They are “lacadasical,” as you suggest, with some authors when the author isn’t perceived as important to all of their staff. Many medium-sized and large publishers end up doing the same thing — usually its because their staff can’t do everything and they prioritize by title.

What would interest me most is why Wolverton did this. It is certainly possible that Wolverton looked at the proposed contract terms with DB or Covenant, and thought they weren’t generous enough, given what he was able to get from New York houses. I wouldn’t be surprised if he couldn’t get DB or Covenant to go higher or give better terms.

Of course, it is also possible that DB or Covenant wanted editorial control that he wasn’t willing to concede.

Your comment actually implies a kind of contempt for publishers, assuming that they don’t offer anything that a smart author can’t buy separately and assign a “secretary” to manage.

That isn’t true. If it were, every blockbuster author would be doing it.