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Amazon Isn't Killing Writing, the Market Is
An anonymous reader writes: Amazon has been struggling for price control of the book and ebook markets for years, battling publicly and privately with publishers while making a lot of authors nervous. With yesterday's announcement of "Kindle Unlimited," a Netflix-like ebook subscription service, Amazon is reaching their endgame in disrupting the book-selling business. But there are other companies doing the same thing, and an article at TechCrunch makes the case that it's the general market, rather than any company in particular, that's making it harder for authors to earn a living. "Driving the prices lower isn't likely to expand the market of readers, since book prices don't seem to be the deciding factor on whether someone reads a book (time is). But those lower prices directly shrink the incomes of authors, who lack any other means of translating their sales into additional revenue. That's why I don't think the big revolution for writers and other content producers will come from Amazon, but rather from startups like Patreon, which allow producers to build audiences directly and develop their own direct subscription model with their most fervent fans."
My issue with subscriptions is that companies tend to not pay the content makers much.
In the past, you made an album as a musician, you got $10-$15. Even a few listeners would more than pay for one's work. First came the $0.99 tracks, then the subscription "revenue" which is little to none, and now album sales are worthless, and musicians have to gig... which is damn hard in areas like Austin where if you are not a hipster crooning about your cat, you won't find anywhere to sing, period.
Before this, we saw a lot of decent bands. Now, the ONLY thing pushed by mainstream labels is their own synthesized bands and nothing else. 20 year ago, people would laugh at a label making a band like The Monkees and refusing to sign Aerosmith or the Rolling Stones.
Now, this market killer is now attacking the book ecosystem.
the whole "print is dead" meme is a myth
people want relevant, accurate news more than ever
people want entertainment that is not formulaic & trite more than ever
the ***ONY*** reasons authors, musicians, journalists and other "content creators" are suffering is because of:
***bad business management of the companies they work for***
these unscrupulous business managers are trained to understand "business" and "profit" as ONLY SHORT TERM METRICS that are abstracted into more "numbers" that they have to "hit"
it's based on the **incorrect** concept that people don't care if their journalism, art, music is quality or not...they cynically assume that people will watch whatever is on TV, read whatver books are put in front of them, and listen to trite, predictable music indefinitely
ITS NOT TRUE
people want variety, they notice repetition...
the only reason is that we, as consumers, have been conditioned by bullshit marketing to have ***REDUCED EXPECTATIONS OF VALUE***
this is a hoodwink, plain and simple
Thank you Dave Raggett
My grandfather had the same problem as a liftboy. The combined forces of Otis and Schindler forced him out of a job.
It's called 'progress'.
Any author can publish nearly anything he wants through Kindle electronically, or CreateSpace in paper and he has control of the price at either one. Both have competitors too, like LightningSource, that have better access to dirt-world bookstores and provide electronic publishing services. If these authors want to be paid more per book, there is not a blessed thing stopping them from doing it right now.
Time Bomber the Book coming soon.
The end of reading as culturally relevant is likely inevitable. It won't disappear, but it will become like poetry - practiced by a few, and written by as many people as read it.
The sad part is that the book market as it stands today obviously makes it clear that there is a (somewhat) viable market. Unfortunately, the introduction of the electronic element means that customers would have to accept that they were paying for the content (whose price hasn't changed) rather than the physical book.
The whole $30 for a hardcover, $10 for a paperback was merely the cover story that people used to allow themselves to spend a lot more money to get the content faster. Stripped of that, most would-be customers can't accept the idea of paying $25 for the first year and then $9 for the electronic copies. They need that tangible crutch to give themselves permission to spend.
Of course, other industries have this problem as well. I will happily spend $30 on a program for the PC, but cannot bring myself to spend $10 for the app that does the identical thing because... my brain tells me $10 for the app is simply too much. So I go without and am less happy for it. Multiple this by millions, and you have the book industry.
Also, Amazon is a market leader, so blaming "the market" is blaming them.
eBook publishers aren't even needed. Software to convert DOC/LaTeX to ePub &c. will do the trick, with proofreaders/editors employed separately, and hosting services a dime a dozen. All that remains is a searchable database, which is a high school project.
There is literally too much content and most of it looks awful.
I took a look Amazon's kindle unlimited this afternoon and what I saw were an incredible number of science fiction authors that I never heard of, pushing out what the blurbs and titles made look like bad romance novels in space.
The functions of the editor and publisher are just missing from this mish mash. If you look at paper publishing it's a large financial commitment to publish and market any given book and most would never pay back the investment. Hence publishers to market the works and editors to select quality material were immensely valuable and helped make certain that if an authors work was published it had a better than random submission chance of earning back it's costs.
Now the cost to "Publsish" as an e-book is minimal and much of what would never have been published in the past is flooding all over the place. So you have lots of "Authors" self publishing and not making money. This really shouldn't come as a shocker. The problem is there are so many of them they overwhelm everything else. If I read correctly Kindle Unlimited has 600,000 titles. It's just numbers but there really just aren't enough people in the world to see that most of those authors make a living from being published there.
every fiat currency bases its value on little more than reputation. The US Dollar is backed by the exact same thing that backs Bitcoins. Someone somewhere believes they have value. Heck most of the currencies in the developed world are fiat.... anything happens to the reputation behind them and they go from functional to not worth the value of the stock they are printed on just like that.
Amazon has done a TON for indy authors and they've shared their profits. When the big publishers tried to force higher prices on Amazon I stopped buying. You would think these asshats would've learned from the music industry - especially since their wares are so much smaller when downloaded and lose no fidelity at all. Now they've all had to settle for big fines but do you think that this will bring readers back into the fold? I doubt it.
This guy has some interesting information about what's going on with out the big publisher bias - other than the fact that his bias is he hates big publishing lol
http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/
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FFS that is why Amazon is trying to solidify it's monopoly over ebooks. Because now more than ever, the number of authors and works available online are increasing at an astonishing rate.
Amazon is trying to take over every corner of the market, but it's simply growing too fast.
Also, while Amazon isn't a complete monopoly, it still has enough control to bring prices this low so far. That's on purpose, but not sustainable. They're getting desperate, bluffing, and they're going to lose.
PS actual book prices doesn't matter as much as the author's royalties and rights actually do.
Oh, Apple are trying to do price-fixing, watch out!
Meanwhile, Amazon's race to the bottom is killing off the profits of authors because all they care about is selling Kindle hardware.
As an example, I used to read a lot of magazines but once the Internet was invented it was much easier visiting websites than buying Playboy.
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With all the comment about this model of publishing, there is no information I can find how much authors are actually paid
Amazon limits the amount of money it receives from individual customers who use this service, That's easy to understand.
But what happens when a book has vast mass appeal.
If millons of customers read this knd of book, is the author paid per view without an upper limit on payment.
Does an author agree to a fixed price buyout for the rights to a book.
Is an author paid per view up to a maximum royalty figure with everything over that going to Amazon.
Does Rowling get the same deal as an unknown author.
Can an author withdraw a book from this pay per view system once it is in it. For example, depending on the royalty rate, it might make sense for an author to place a book in the Amazon ecology to see if it has legs and then self publish outside of Amazon if the book is a big seller
In responding to this, please try to indicate whether you have acutal factual knowledge of the payment schedule and authors contract terms as opposed to whether you are just commenting or speculating.
"Techcrunch" and particularly their head honcho Masnick are unapologetic corporate shills.
It used to be that if you wanted to learn a new skill picking up a book and reading about it was the most commonly available option. For many skills a quick how-to video on YouTube is sufficient. Books will never go away completely but they aren't always the best and/or only commonly available option.
Anybody see where I left my buggy whip?
The real problem is too many middle men. Publish a DRM-Free ebook on your own website and I will buy.
Jack Conte and Nataly Dawn's experience with Youtube, and music publishers basically summed it up like this:
You can either go to a studio, sign a contract and /maybe/ make back your advance and /possibly/ hit the lottery and fill arenas
or
Cut out the middle-man and get more direct support and actually make a living. Nataly set up a Kickstarter for her first album and got 5x more than she expected.
Thus the motivation for Patreon.
Watch this interview:
Part 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Part 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Part 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
And skip (if you want, the cover is pretty darn good) to the end of this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
--
BMO
It only takes something like 1000-2000 regular donors to keep a writer in reasonable comfort. In the age of the Internet, that is really not a lot. As good writers want to write and are typically not motivated by money unlike the publishers that just try to get rich on their backs, this is all it takes. Of course, publishers will fight this tooth and nail, as it threatens their existence. An existence that benefits absolutely nobody but themselves though, so their demise will be something eminently welcome. I predict this will not kill all publishers though. There are those that actually respect their authors and customers, are not primarily motivated by money, and have a positive effect on the overall process. These will remain. I doubt however that any of the large publishers will be among the survivors.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
the collusion [that wasn't collusion] between Apple and publishers wasn't bad for authors or the publishing industry as a whole.
I can't speak for everybody, of course, but I DO let price dictate if I buy a book or not, even if it's an author I love. And if it's a debut author, or one I haven't read before, I'm unlikely to be thrilled with paying $8+ for a book.
The vast majority of the books I read are on the Kindle. The vast majority of those books are either carefully-chosen self-published authors or books either Amazon and/or the publisher is selling for no more than $6. Publishers that want to continue to insist on "charging" more than $10 for a book are collecting precisely $0 of my reading dollars. (Meaning that they'll collect the same amount of money from me pricing e-books at a $1B/copy.)
Self-publishing is really the way to go these days for new authors. The average traditionally-published manuscript makes $0, as the average manuscript isn't picked up by a publisher at all. And the ones that do get published receive far less support from publishers than they used to, as they have so many imprints now that the effort that can be expended on a random debut author is just about zilch; they get a few review copies sent out, minimal editing services, and maybe a short blurb in a trade rag. With that limp level of support, it's not surprising few debut authors clear their initial advance, when they are only clearing 15% royalties.
Contrast that with the 70% (of a lower price) Amazon is offering on anybody that chooses to post a book. The only additional effort authors must expend is doing their own cover and editing. They were already largely responsible for their own promotion anyway, so that doesn't really change.
In the "good 'ol days" publishers served a real function. They provided substantial editing support, decent promotional effort, and were, in any case, the only game in town. Now the number of books published per year by the traditional publishers has gone up, and the services they provide authors have gone down. They have reduced themselves to nothing more than middlemen between authors and retailers. Nowhere but books and music do we tolerate the middlemen taking such a large chunk of the available money for little more than distribution.
Liberals jobs will be automated LOL. ;-]]
What with 99% of today's authors being business people first, marketing experts second, and authors last, this is a good development.
you are believing the marketing...you are accepting *their* framing of the situation
it is a false choice...many excellent films are also hugely popular **when they get the marketing push**
producing shitty movies still costs alot of money, ex: ***TRANSFORMERS SERIES***
end of discussion
absolutely hook line and sinker...you are part of the problem
YES...people often just want to be distracted...busy people working hard dont have time to curate their entertainment like some of us
THAT DOES NOT MEAN YOU ARE RIGHT
just because people will accept the best of what is available doesnt mean that ***if they had a choice*** they wouldn't choose the better option
your point is like saying "People go to Wal-Mart...it's hugely popular...that proves that people would rather have a cheap chinese made bicycle rather than a US made one"
Wal-Mart gets all the customers not because of quality, but because of *******ARTIFICIAL SCARCITY IN THE MARKET*********
it's an engineered lack of options...it's obvious and you are a dupe for not seeing it
Thank you Dave Raggett
Assuredly I'm exaggerating, but would you want a billion readers paying a dollar each for your book or 100,000 readers paying 15 to 20 dollars each. (The asshats here being the publishers using the dead-trees business model.)
I responded to another person like you, but since you mentioned TRANSFORMERS...
that proves my point, actually
Transformers remakes are shit
they grossed alot of money
that ****does not prove you right****
because there is ***NO CHOICE***
moviegoers couldn't choose between different versions of the remake...you are taking a false choice and twisting it to prove a non-existent point
if they want to see Transformers with updated special effects, there is only one option...seeing the ones with horrible writing
also, we're several iterations into this now...people have been conditioned to accept lower quality by artificial scarcity
lastly, it doesn't matter that some people will watch anything...YES...I admit that is a true fact
just because people will watch whatever shit gets most marketing doesn't mean that they wouldn't ***choose a better option if they had one***
you logic is backwards...by your logic, a zoo animal *must* like their food because they eat all of it...forget the fact that *it's all the food they get*
Thank you Dave Raggett
There is literally too much content and most of it looks awful.
There is literally as much content as the market will bear, no more, no less.
Amazon doesn't want to kill writing. They want to kill publishing. BIG difference.
If that's the case, then explain Twilight. It's not like there aren't choices of books out there...
not at all. You need to ask yourself who has disposable income. It's mostly teenagers, They're young, and stuff that's repetitious to you is brand new to them. . There's a smattering of young married women (who, as it turns out, make most of the buying decisions in a family after the teenage years, and yes I know not all of them are married any more). But a more discerning is usually made up of middle aged men who don't have much in the form of disposable income (nerds aside)
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Market invisible hand fails here, it seems better suited at destroying value than creating it.
And we even know why: market invisible hand theory relies on a few assumptions, one of them being that products are identical and that buyers' choices are only driven by price. Once we say that "book prices don't seem to be the deciding factor on whether someone reads a book", we know it will not work. If producing books is considered important, then the market should be regulated.
They tried that. Several cities ended up outlawing it, threatening to put people like Julie Bass in jail for growing victory gardens in their front yards.
I agree with you that an editor provides valuable service. This means an author needs to work this service into her budget. How much does it typically cost for a private author, as opposed to a major publisher, to hire an editor?
"Of course, old favorites won't disappear. They'll be a handful of new discoveries each year from self-publishing. Enough that books won't be "dead". But the idea that book reading will become marginal enough that it's cultural significance will essentially be irrelevant."
More books or at least book-length works are being published now than in the past. So a few percentage of good books out of a couple of million bad books is still a lot.
This development parallells the development of culture in other fields, such as music. Before the nineteenth century, you could probably count on your fingers and toes the number of composers who were as good as Beethoven and Mozart, since any would-be Beethoven would need not just be talented but had to live near a place where he could hear good live music that he could learn to imitate first then later surpass with masterpieces of his own.
With the development of recorded music and mass-produced musical instruments, any middle-class person of even mediocre musical talent could listen to good or nearly good music just just by switching on the turn table and later the cassette and CD players.
Today, people have greater access to writing and greater access to a possible audience. Many of today's "books" are actually written in "submarine" form, probably serialized in the writer's blog or written as fan faction. And so, the audience even gets access to the act of writing itself. Writers who blog their novels get feedback from readers whose collective comments effectively make them "crowd" editors, similar to the way Wikipedia works.
What you lament is the coming demise of writing and culture is no more than the death of the rock star, or the Shakespeares or Beethovens of the past because their numbers have multiplied through the spread of mass culture.
Publishers that want to continue to insist on "charging" more than $10 for a book are collecting precisely $0 of my reading dollars.
Where did you get $10 as your price ceiling? For example, if you attend school and discover that a class you're taking requires a textbook that costs more than $10, do you drop that class? I say this in the context of having bought a DRM-free copy of Edenics, an etymological science fiction book by Isaac Mozeson, for $15.
Apart from distribution, publishers used to perform two important services: editing manuscripts into something enjoyable to read, and promoting worthy books. How would Amazon prefer that those services be performed?
Your ideas are just so wrong. If people didn't want to watch those movies, they don't have to go to the movies at all. There is plenty of other things to do that cost a whole hell of a lot less money.
People went to see those movies because they wanted to see those movies. That is the only reason.
You're making a gigantic assumption that people have to go to watch a movie, when the reality is there is many other options available that have zero to do with movies.
good luck finding that info, because I doubt it exists, since like everything else in the publishing industry, 99% of editors work for publishers, and the other 1% work for various other publication types.
AFAIK, eBook sales went up to around 15% and stayed there. Does anyone have any more up to date info? Of course Amazon reports that its sales overtook physical books but that's the business they're in and it isn't representative of sales overall.
I love gadgets and totally get the potential for eReaders and eBooks, however, my experiences with them have been so poor (buying, reading, trying to find passages to cite, dealing with DRM, etc.) that I only buy physical books now. Even with academic papers, I'd rather print them out (I don't own a printer so I have to go to the print shop down the road) so I can comfortably and conveniently annotate and highlight texts. Yes, it's technically possible to do it on an eReader but it just isn't practical enough to be productive.
eReaders and eBooks will have to get a whole lot better to compete with physical books.
tell me, what other Transformers remakes are out there?
but that's parenthetical (you and I both know there isn't one)
my *original main point* was that TFA's diagnosis is just dead wrong
a certain number of people are "sheeple" yes...but that does not prove TFA's assertions ***AT ALL***
just because **some** people will watch "whatever is on" doesn't mean that they wouldn't choose a better option, when put in front of them
Thank you Dave Raggett
my original comment, and the point of this thread is not to explain every shitty film/book franchise out there
there's taste, personal preference, etc...
but what I *can* explain is why the idea that "print is dead" and TFA's assertions about why are dumb and wrong.
it's bad business decisions made from the managers who think their job is to hit abstract "numbers" instead of facilitate their talent
*that's what i can explain*
Thank you Dave Raggett
Wal-Mart is a know exploiter of labor & is roundly hated for their business practices
the fact that you somehow idealize their outsourcing of small town America indicates further discussion with you will be unfruitful
Watch this documentary to start educating yourself: Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price (2005)
Thank you Dave Raggett
I've found the opposite. My local Chapters is good at stocking mostly big names. However, since I picked up a Kindle a few years ago, I've found tons of good authors I'd not heard of before. Yes, there is some formulaic drivel, but the biggest problem for the most part is a few typos here and there.
How often do you review a book before buying it at a bookstore? At least online, I see a bunch of reviews and can read what people have to say before I buy. The worst book I got was actually from a bookstore. Perhaps it might have come up with a good plot, but the terrible repetition and generally poor editing made it unreadable
some crooked fsker went and downmodded all my responses
***i protest these downmods b/c they are not deserved***
my posts have always been on topic, IMHO interesting, and at least involves direct clash of ideas
I WAS DOWNMODDED FOR PERSONAL/POLITICAL REASONS NOT BECAUSE OF MY IDEAS BEING WRONG
cowards show yourselves, and explain as an AC or GTFO
Thank you Dave Raggett
you're reductive notion, that anything that sells is therefore 'awesome' and worthy of praise
HORSESHIT
you're blatantly wrong about this, and it's common knowledge
Wal-Mart is easily an evil, despotic purveyor broken dreams
Thank you Dave Raggett
They are like real estate agents. There are more of them chasing the same pie. Markets forces will win eventually and we'll get fewer new books because that is what the market is asking for.
Don't blame this on Amazon.
How is renting a book for a month any different than borrowing that same book from the library for a month (as far as the publisher is concerned)?
As long as Amazon has bought enough "copies" of the book to cover everyone who is reading that book at any given time, then the publisher has already made their money.
It's possible that amazon IS screwing over the publishers, by either paying too low of a price per copy or by not paying for all the copies in circulation, but that has nothing to do with the legitimacy of the rental service itself.
wtf the authors get squeezed? Pub copsts are down as they mergered and laid off thousands of employees. Then jacked up book prices blaming cost of paper. Look at textbook prices since the 90s-its criminal. FYI I ran the retail floor of my college's off campus textbook store so I know this market.
Now publishing is \going more electronic so no paper and I cant afford book prices so my book come from Half Price Books clearance shelves for $1-2 each and my public library.
Given that there is a wealth of high-quality material (more than enough to completely fill how much time I have to read) for less than $10, why pay more?
If publishers choose to charge more than I'm willing to pay for a book, that's their business. And if I choose to not buy said book, that's my business.
Clearly I am advocating for the collapse of civilization as we know it, suggesting that authors get paid more at the same time readers get to pay less.
In in case you prefer a concrete example: I don't think you'll find a lot of people will be sympathetic to whining that The Art of Computer Programming by Donald Knuth costs $36.49 on Kindle.
I wasn't talking about small-press-run reference works, or college textbooks. I, and everybody else in the whole debate, is referring to general-interest fiction and non-fiction works.
That said... why, nearly 30 years after the last time it was edited (or even typeset), does K&R cost $50? For that kind of money, they could at least typeset the thing using technology more recent than what was available in the mid-80's!
Get a card... yes a library card.
Donate the 12x Amazon fee to the local friends of the library
and have at it.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
I'm in the process of trying to self-publish some short stories now. The old way of doing this was to find a magazine or anthology related to short works - most of which are extinct today. Like Wikipedia killed Britannica and Encarta, the flood of free quality content today is killing the traditional ways of becoming renown. Trouble is there is so much (and more crud) its getting harder to find - drowning in entropy. The bigger shops like Amazon have done a good job on Kindle Direct Publishing, but the problem is it only seems to work for established authors. And its a fractured market. Even with the Kindle App, a lot of people won't use it... so as a self-publisher you've got to explore other publishing media too (like Kobo, B&N [that doesn't support Canadian authors], iBooks [that requires a Mac and multiple publish steps], and Google Play books [that is so awkward to use many people don't bother]. A publish, stream service kind of makes sense. Writers are burned by royalties anyway. (http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2014/07/21/why-amazon-terrifies-publishers-lets-look-at-royalty-statements/)
Amazon - 30% for under $1. Kobo is 45%. And who would pay $1 for a short story when they can buy a novel for a $1? Or even get something free. The price is becoming less meaningful. Amazon will still likely push work through the service that is promoted - leaving out self publishers.
Shameless plug: I'm blogging about my experiences trying these things here (http://selfloathingit.blogspot.ca).
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