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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."
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
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.
And even those are not earning much money.
In a interview a few years ago with Ani DiFranco, the report was gushing on how much higher her margins, as a independent artist, than The Dave Mathew Band. Which made DiFranco laugh because The Dave Mathew Band was making so much more money. DiFranco pointed out that going independent was about freedom of control not about the money.
It is not about margins it is about market structure. Piracy has trained consumers that music should be cheap.