Authors keep using publishing houses because too many authors are insecure dilettantes and want a pat on the head from someone to reassure them they're Real Writers - and therefore people of cultural weight and import.

And it remains true that top-selling established authors do okay out of trad pub. The 1% of writers in that category get decent enough advances and some PR support.

Everyone else is wasting their time and getting screwed over. Including a tragically large number of people who write for university presses. (I really hope Piketty got a lawyer to look over his contract.)

Writers are not, generally, minded to think of writing as a business full of business people doing business people things.

But some do - in increasing numbers. If you know anything about the industry, you'll know that where ten years ago it was taken as read that you needed an agent and a real publisher, otherwise you were just some noob with a vanity contract, the reality now is that writers are stampeding away from the agent+publisher deal package.

Agents are literally panicking about their jobs.

The charge has been led by romance writers, who have a terrifyingly efficient business and support association (the RWA) and not a few self-made self-pub millionaires.

The problem with a site like HN is that most people posting here know very little about the industry. But when you're in it, and you've been following developments in detail for a few years, the picture doesn't look the same as it does from outside.

Harvard UP did not promote it, or indeed print enough copies. It could have been self published and done just as well. It was written in French after all and still succeeded, with the interest starting before it was translated. Academics use academic publishing houses largely for historic reasons.

So HUP or the original French publisher provided Piketty no benefit?

I doubt it. Academic publishers do not really do much promotion, other than sending lists of books to academic libraries (where there is a reputation effect however, which does help, but for Piketty those sales were nothing compared to retail). Academic bestsellers are extremely rare.

I don't know about HUP but Springer certainly doesn't. The only editorial support is answering questions about providing camera-ready copy and the only marketing support is ensuring libraries get copies of their catalogs.

Springer is definitely bad; they're mostly just a service for printing books, stamping their logo on them, and getting them into academic libraries. However, MIT Press is excellent. There's a big range of support and quality control among publishers. Zero Books is also quite successful as a nontraditional quasi-academic press. They've developed a niche style that's popular in a certain audience (academic but readable and short, ~70-100 page books on a specific subject). So authors publishing a "Zero Book" through Zero get a bunch of built-in exposure to the audience the publisher has cultivated, in part through marketing (the brand is known, individual academics often aren't), and in part because readers trust it to do some quality/style control so the books in their catalog fit the expected style.

As a reader I like finding publishers like that because it reduces the noise for me considerably and improves discoverability: browsing http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/new-titles or http://www.zero-books.net/forthcoming-titles.html is actually manageable. With a few such publishers (I follow about 5 semi-regularly) you can keep abreast of a lot of interesting things happening without having to recognize the individual authors or do extensive research on them; I outsource the job of doing that to the publisher.