And there are a million soup-makers in the naked city. So I can put some stuff in this contract that's good for me, and even if some of the authors throw a fit, it doesn't matter because I can always get somebody else to stir the pot. So we get lousy book club percentages, and the moral rights clause, and flat rate payments instead of royalty contracts because we're not really writers, we're soupmakers. They come to an agreement, each taking a percentage of the profits. It makes the author an employee.
People respect their partners, but they direct their employees.
Then there's the moral rights clause. It says the publisher won't mess with our stories, but that he can change our words, the way we wrote them. It's still soup. Until publishers treat category fiction like works of art instead of cans of soup and writers like artists instead of cooks, we're going to be fighting an uphill battle. The pool of writers for such a line is huge and excellent and just waiting for a publisher who understands the difference between fiction and soup.