The Top Five Dumbest Business Practices in Publishing From the real world perspective, publishing is really, really, really known for its head-shakingly stupid business practices. But inside of publishing, these practices have become so common and set in “the way things are done” as to be defended by otherwise sane business people. So I figured I would honor Dave Letterman’s departure with a quick top five list. I’ll give the real world equivalent of the publishing practice, then the actual publishing practice, working down to the most stupid publishing practice of them all. There are many others. I try to deal with a lot of them in the Killing the…