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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."
I don't see anything in the rest of your post that supports the idea that the reading is about to become a lost art practiced by only a few.
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.
You are correct that companies don't pay content producers enough. However, your knowledge of how things 'used to be' is badly flawed.
No one in the history of the music industry has ever gotten paid $10 per album sold. Even the biggest names rarely get as much as $2. Many 'big name' artists have sold millions of albums and were paid as little as 50 cents per album.
"With publishers gone, we all essentially become slush pile readers."
Sure, I decide which font I use on my device, which font size, margin, line spacing and so on, if the author knows where to click for the spellchecker, I'm good with the slush.
All the 25 professions that got axed were just useful when printing on a specific size of dead tree.
I say: Good riddance.
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
Not even big musicians ever got $10-$15. Artists typically would get anywhere from 8 to 14 percent and major stars would get 20 percent of album sales. Even after inflation adjustments you're only talking about $5 per album at the high end. What happened was album prices went down - If albums stayed in line with inflation they'd be $100 per album now. http://theunderstatement.com/p...
Book prices are going the opposite direction! A mass market paperback in 1975 cost $1.35, adjusted for inflation that's about $5.97. The average mass market price now? Around $8. 25% higher. The issue with books is that publishers create these insane contracts to allow them to suck every last penny out before cutting a royalty cheque. So if you take the adjusted amount a 1975 author could typically expect $0.59 per copy sold, today's author should be able to expect $0.80 per copy sold right? In reality because of the contract loopholes they end up getting at most $0.32 per copy sold.
So authors are typically being payed 60-70% less than in 1975. In addition to this the number of titles published per year has skyrocketed - 135,000 titles are published every year now. That's a lot of competition just within the industry let alone competing for peoples most valuable thing: time. There's going to be a major contraction in the book market to correct for this regardless of what Amazon does.