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Amazon Is Recruiting Authors For Its eBook Library
Nate the greatest writes "Amazon just announced a $6 million pool of money that it plans to pay authors. All you have to do to get a share of the loot is commit to sell your ebook exclusively through the Kindle Store and agree to let your ebook be lent to Kindle Prime members. Amazon has already signed up a number of authors, including 31 of the top 50 self-published ones (J. Carson Black, Gemma Halliday, J.A. Konrath, B.V. Larson, C.J. Lyons, Scott Nicholson, Julie Ortolon, Theresa Ragan, J.R. Rain, Patricia Ryan, and more). It looks like Amazon launched this to support the Kindle Owners' Lending Library that Amazon launched just over a month ago. When it launched it had around 5 thousand titles as well as some less than voluntary participants. But there's a catch. Authors are required to give Amazon an exclusive on any title in the program. That means they're giving up the rest of the ebook market. Would any authors care to weigh in on the deal?"
My publishers don't give me stats that distinguish what ebook readers are purchasing my books, so I really don't know what percentage the kindle accounts for. However I also have a few Kindle books (ie exclusively Kindle) and they aren't exactly flying off the (virtual) shelves.
I would guess that with the Amazon marketing machine working for you, any book is going to sell better than without it. I expect that would be strong enough incentive to be willing to experiment with a book or two.
Apache guy, Open Source enthusiast, runner
This is the 21st century. Why do we still have book publishing?! Everything should by indie and self marketed.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
I'm sure the money is tempting but I really dislike this. I'm trying to imagine a future where publishers stop printing books, and we end up with an all eBook world that requires you to have a particular platform or device to read said books!
Do we really want to follow an "exclusive for this platform" model like consoles for books?!?!?
- sigs are for wimps.
Good authors would incredibly stupid to do this. All this will do is draw unknowns/not established authors.
This is only partially about cornering the eBook market (or should I say peripherally). The Amazon Prime lending library's main drawback is the lack of established authors and more current works. I'm just betting this is a trial program to test the waters. Mr. Bezos' next step will be to extend such an offer to a big name author. Ultimately, I believe his goal is to essentially dismantle the existing infrastructure of publishers and agents, with Amazon, of course, being the corporate entity to jump in and allow authors more or less direct access to the market without those middlemen taking a cut. In the short term, I like this plan. Any time a layer of middlemen can be eliminated it is simply a matter of the market making a process more efficient, which is a good thing, both for authors (less cuts out of their royalties) and for Amazon (larger pool of renowned authors). The issue is the long term implication. If this process leads to all authors being locked into a proprietary tech, that is bad. So, in short, authors should be happy, but tread carefully and be sure to be aware of what the motives are for these moves. If handled carefully, authors can still win this battle in the long term - they have the truly irreplaceable commodity here, their words.
For some books, time to market is important. Getting the first three months @ 100% of that market is taking the cream from the top, and helps Amazon as a goto-place for new fresh titles. There's a lot of money in that space.
I don't see, however, how this means (as the post indicates) that Amazon is getting out of the rest of the eBook business; that inference doesn't make sense. And as an author, I'll put my books through ALL channels at eBook publishing point, especially the lucrative alternate channels. There is no need to make Amazon exclusively rich. They're going to have a hard time pulling the entire program off, IMHO.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Please spend that money to hire editors!
I've been reading a decent amount of self-published stuff over the past year and I've come across a lot of material that would be pretty darn good if only it had been given just the most basic pass by a competent editor. Misspellings, partially revised sentences, incorrect punctuation, etc. I'm hoping that, one of these days, I find a story compelling enough that I'll offer to pay for the services of a good editor. Then I could call myself a patron of the arts.
I'll come clean and admit it: I wrote a novel, and it was soundly rejected by over a hundred agents, 90 of whom didn't even look at it (this is very common.) A dozen requested either partials or even the full manuscript, but the final verdict was that although the store was good and entertaining, it was too strange. Traditional publishers are risk averse these days and anyone who wants to do something out of the mainstream is best off looking at non-tradional publishing. Amazon could be come the niche marketplace for people who like weird or controversial subjects that don't really have a mainstream market out there.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Authors are required to give Amazon an exclusive on any title in the program. That means they're giving up the rest of the ebook market.
Does the agreement preclude any physical book being made? Or does Amazon also have exclusive rights to the hardcopy, and what happens if Amazon chooses not to publish a physical book? Does the copyright revert after a time?
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
From what I have read on J.A. Konrath's blog the royalties and terms are better. The big downside is the exclusive ebook rights. Your book won't appear in the nook store. Konrath deal included physical book publishing with Amazon. So his books will be printed by Amazon. Personally I think Amazon is making a mistake with the exclusive books. This kind of thing will keep some people from buying digital. If they gain enough market share from it they could be looking at a Anti Trust suit.
I'm an indie author (see sig) with a couple of books on sale at Amazon, among other places. On the one hand, Amazon already accounts for about 90% of my sales, so I wouldn't be giving up much revenue by offering a title there exclusively, and it wouldn't take much borrowing to make up the loss. On the other hand, everyone and his dog will jump on this programme, so that $6 million pie is going to be cut into a lot of very thin slices, to the point that the likely reward doesn't seem worth what I have to give up in order to participate. If someone manages to challenge Amazon as an ebook retailer, I don't want to be locked out of them. On the gripping hand, I've seen what companies do when they become monopolies, and I've no desire to help build another one.
Bricks-and-mortar libraries don't tell authors and publishers, "We'll stock your books if you promise not to sell them anywhere else." Then again, no library is anywhere near as big or influential as Amazon...
Just another wannabe fantasy novelist...
Anyone wanting to know how the publishing industry works, including the reasons why and why not to use traditional publishing, should read Kristine Kathryn Rusch's blog "The Business Rush: On Writing."
How to evaluate a traditional publishing company
The dangers of self-publishing with Amazon
Negotiating with publishers (read the second part, too)
How to make traditional publishing writer friendly
In short, if you want to publish your work, read Rusch first. She's worked in the industry for 30+ years. BTW, you may want to buy some of her sci-fi books, too. :-)
JA
http://www.johnalex.org/
The basic idea of Amazon's program is certainly intriguing. And Amazon itself is fully aware that this program must be compelling for authors to sign on with it. There must be a decent reward for an author to sign an exclusivity deal with them. The idea is, Amazon puts up a kitty of $500K. All authors who join into the program and add a title (or more) to the free lending library for Amazon's Prime subscribers (This in important! Remember 'Amazon Prime' as you read all this!). Let's say 1,000 books were borrowed by Amazon Prime subscribers during the month, and 100 of them were yours. That means that 10% of the books borrowed were your title. So, you get 10% of the $500,000 for a cool $50K pay day at the end of the month. That's pretty damned nice! VERY compelling to join into the pool!
Essentially, in exchange for 90 days of exclusivity and allowing your book to be read for free by Amazon Prime subscribers, you get a share of the pool each month. You also get good exposure by allowing some readers to see your book for free. If they liked it, they may blog or tell their friends about it, which would only increase the number of borrowings from Amazon Prime subscribers. In addition to this, if a subscriber likes your book enough that they'd like to own it outright, they can buy it and you get paid again!
So? Where's the catch? It's in the numbers. Several groups of numbers, actually.
First, there will be a lot more than just a thousand borrowings of a book. And a lot more than just a few authors offering their books. And all you need is ONE big name author to add a book to the mix to completely skew the results. If Stephen King decides to offer his next awesome book to the offering as an exclusive, every King fan is going to want to download it for free. That means, if your book got 100 downloads, but King's book got 100,000, then you only get at most .1% of the kitty that month, for a whopping sum of $500. That means that King gets that extra Jaguar in his garage for just in case the Lotus gets a flat. (He has neither, I'm just making a point.) Any time some big time author—King, Gibson, Steele, Roberts, Rowling—feel they need an extra $400,000+ real quick, all they have to do is offer their book as an exclusive for three months and allow folks to borrow it via the KDPSelect program, and all the little guys are pretty much SOL. Note: in truth, it is the publishing companies who control distribution of the books these authors write, and the publishers are the ones who will benefit the most from such a deal.
Second, who is borrowing from Amazon's lending program? NOT everybody. Only paying subscribers to Amazon's Prime program will have access to the Kindle Owners Lending. So, out of the Kindle owners out there, only those who chose to pay a subscription fee to Amazon each month will have access to the lending pool. Each member is only allowed to borrow one title per month. That's important! So, they are going to be choosy about what they borrow for free. Are they going to use their one chance per month to borrow the hottest title on the market (like the Jobs biography)? Or try out some unknown author? Unless they've heard something about the unknown author, they are going to go with the guaranteed good read. What's vital about this is that the number of subscribers is a small subset of the total of Kindle owners.
As of November 2011, the Amazon Kindle had about 41% of the market share of all ebook readers sold, down from 47% at the end of 2010. Apple's iPad is in second, and Barnes & Noble's Nook is in third and rapidly gaining market share. The number of Kindle owners subscribing to Prime membership will only be a small percentage out of that 41% of the total market.
That means, as a new and unknown author, I would be limiting exposure of my first book to maybe less that 5% (WAG) of the total ebook reader market for a total of 90 days. And if there is a big name author in
Whew! This water sure is cold!