There are still some houses out there that have editors who edit and shape books, but yes, they’re rarer and rarer. I was in publishing for 20 years, including copy editing book manuscripts. I stuck mostly to nonfiction tech books. They paid better. But the mergers of the eighties effectively turned publishing houses into shells of their former selves regarding author services. Publishing was always a low profit margin industry to begin with. I think we may see the print-on-demand aspect that we heard about years ago becoming a reality as ebooks assume larger and larger shares of the market. On the other hand–you can’t autograph an ebook.

But you’d think there would still be a niche for ebook publishers who offered serious editing, e-marketing and market research. I know my own web novel could use those.