> In fairness to Verso, the structural problem is that sales of books,
> like all other purchased cultural material, are highly unpredictable.
> As a rule, one out of ten books, films, movies, TV shows, and
> videogames will hit the jackpot, and the rest either barely break even
> or lose money. So the few winners end up subsidizing the rest.
"These relations turn on the question of the origin of the production. In some earlier relations, notably those of the productive post-artisanal and the market professional, it indeed quite often happened that a work originated in a commission, from a bookseller or a publisher. But in the corporate structure this has become very much more common, in relation to a highly organized and fully capitalized market in which direct commissioning of planned saleable products has become the normal mode.
"It is virtually impossible to estimate the proportion of such relations, within books as a whole, since some and perhaps much commissioning is still, in cultural terms, governed by considerations of what authors would in any case wished to write. But in an important and rising number of cases, the relations are not really of this kind. The dominance of the corporate publishing sector is such that for many writers the most available social relations are those of of employment in this sense, with the ideas for books coming from new professional intermediaries (publishers' editors) within the market structure, and authors being employed to execute them."
Raymond WIlliams, _Sociology of Culture_, 1981
"Employment" implying commissions and royalties, not an hourly wage.