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."

Comments

"the market" = biz managers

[globaljustin]

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