New opportunities for authors

... The book industry is of interest to economists because it is driven by commercial and cultural motivations, with the titles of many memoirs and scholarly studies reflecting these two imperatives, such as Literature, Money and the Market (Delany 2002), Reluctant Capitalists (Miller 2006), and Merchants of Culture (Thompson 2010). Examples of investigations into the book industry by economists include: the practices of authors as creative and cultural producers (Throsby and Zednik 2010; Walls 2014); the " superstar " effect on book sales (Adler 2006; Peltier and Moreau 2012); debate about blockbuster versus long-tail sales patterns (Anderson 2006; Elberse 2013); the impact of ebooks (Cheng and Wang 2011; Farchy, Gansemer, and Petrou 2013; Benhamou 2014); the diversity of book sales (Benhamou and Peltier 2007; Ginsburgh and Weber 2011; Ginsburg, Weber and Wever 2011); the case for open access publishing (Mueller-Langer and Scheufen 2013; Blommaert 2014); and industry studies (Caves 2000; Canoy, van Ours and van der Ploeg 2006). Scholars working in the fields of publishing history and literary history have increasingly acknowledged the role of market forces in influencing the types of books which are written, published, circulated and read. 2 Eisenstein (2005, p. 115) notes that authors' ambivalence between " serving the muses " or " serving the market " date back to the sixteenth century. ...