Slashdot Mirror
Amazon Bypassing Publishers By Signing Authors Directly
Hugh Pickens writes "David Streitfeld reports that Amazon is aggressively wooing top authors, gnawing away at the services publishers, critics and agents used to provide. 'Everyone's afraid of Amazon,' says Richard Curtis, a longtime agent who is also an e-book publisher. 'The only really necessary people in the publishing process now are the writer and reader,' adds Russell Grandinetti, one of Amazon's top executives. 'Everyone who stands between those two has both risk and opportunity.' But publishers are fighting back at writers who publish with Amazon. In 2010 Kiana Davenport signed with a division of Penguin for The Chinese Soldier's Daughter, a Civil War love story, and received a $20,000 advance. In the meantime Davenport packaged several award-winning short stories she had written 20 years ago and packaged them in an e-book, Cannibal Nights, available on Amazon. When Penguin found out, it went 'ballistic,' accusing her of breaking her contractual promise to avoid competition, canceling her novel, and suing Davenport to recover her advance. Davenport knows her crime: 'Sleeping with the enemy? Perhaps. But now I know who the enemy is.'"
Amazon is a retailer; it's only recently become a publisher as well. From what they've said, one of the reasons why established authors have been signing up with Amazon as a publisher is that their contracts are far more author-friendly than trade publishers.
According to the author they were two entirely different works, and even different subject matter, and she doesn't believe she was in breach of contract...
Now if she signed some sort of "I'll publish everything through you" exclusive contract, or right to first sale of all her works, or some similar contract, she may well have been in breach, but that's not what it sounds like here.
Depends how the contract is worded. The author seems to think she gave Penguin exclusivity on her new book, not her old stuff. I've never heard of a publishing company having a fit when you publish old stuff (previously published no less, just bound up in a new collection), while working on a book for them. It's possible that Penguin writes their contacts that way and the author simply misunderstood or didn't read carefully enough, but it seems really odd to me. It sounds like Penguin is interpreting a non-compete clause rather more liberally than is traditional in order to punish the author for going through Amazon. I don't have all the facts of course, she may have legitimately broken faith with them, but from what we have that doesn't appear to be that case.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Ultimately a publisher these days is simply a one stop shop offering a loan, editing, typesetting, cover art, promotion, distribution and a selection of other tasks that are needed to make a book successful.
No, 30 years ago that's what a publisher was. These days only a very, very small minority of those authors who get picked up by publishers get that (i.e. the ones who are already best sellers). Everyone else gets a negligible advance, negligible editing, typesetting they could have done themselves, cover art, no promotion, minimal distribution (their book goes into the distribution catalogues, but hardly onto shelves, which the author could have done on their own) and no other services.
Or expect Amazon to hire editors.