Please sir, can I have some more (sales)?

The economy sucks, and publishing is a dinosaur of an industry. A plus B equals a lot of manuscripts getting orphaned.

Editors are always moving from house to house, but with the current economic "situation" more are jumping ship (or walking the plank) than usual, leaving beind projects that they acquired but that no one else has the time or the inclination to pick up. Some of these are great lyrical works, magnum opuses (opusi?) that would have changed the world and sold really well with the proper help. Most of them are mid-list filler titles that were acquired to make up numbers.

The article says that you can overcome the bad sales and reputation left by orphan-itis by writing under a pseudonym or getting a new hobby slash career. The moral here: writing is a crap career.