What Do Book Publishers Actually Do?

The discourse now turns to publishers once again. Most books go unread, claims one widely-read Substack piece, and the traditional publishing model is rotting away. Others counterbalanced that view, and I found myself, despite my own newfound zeal for the self-published, agreeing more with the correctives offered for the viral piece. Rather than rehash all the arguments, I’ll explain, instead, what I think traditional publishers still do for writers—and what, for a variety of reasons, they do not. The old model is old, but it’s built on a certain logic. It’s not vanishing anytime soon.