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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
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.
Ah yes, that tragic story was detailed in the Spielberg classic, "Schindler's Lift".
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.
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.
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/
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Sorry, lost the thread.
With e-books becoming more dominant and less money coming into the industry, the bookstores die (they're already highly marginal now). With bookstores' death, so go the publishers (after all, any established author will make more money from self-publishing and now the *one* (incredibly important) thing the publishers offer - shelf space - is gone).
With publishers gone, we all essentially become slush pile readers. The books are nearly free, but the constraint is *time*, not money, and with the publishers gone, we're now looking at instead of 1 in 10 new books being decent, we're looking at 1 in 1,000. And quite frankly, there's movies and Angry Birds on our e-book readers that have a much higher payoff rate.
Established authors do okay, but the discovery rate of new authors drops like a stone. Sure a handful get discovered each year, but the current book industry discovers thousands each year. (Where discover means they are distinguished enough from the crowd to have a *chance* at success.) As there are fewer and fewer new authors making it (but more and more authors writing for at least a generation while writing is culturally relevant), the signal to noise ratio keeps dropping.
Even worse, businesses realize that while selling books doesn't make much money, selling services to desperate authors makes a killing. If you are browsing to find a new author you know nothing about, Amazon currently shows us the top 1,000 or so books from mainstream publishers, with a few self-published in the mix. At some point, it makes a *lot* more money by showing us the top 1,000 books from the authors willing to pay the most.
And unfortunately, unlike mainstream publishers, who invest in a book not because they love it, but because they believe it will be what you want to read, would-be self-published authors aren't buying advertising based on the books quality, but on their own personal resources.
Amazon, et al. will make a lot of money for decades even as the book market to readers collapse.
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.
i.e. like poetry.
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.
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.
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
Or you could stop being a mouth-breather and become an engineer or technoweenie.
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.
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.
Professional editing isn't just about the appearance of a text on the page, it can also be about making the text coherent and understandable. Kindle-only books on Amazon are often riddled with errors like one passage accidently moved to the wrong part of the book by a careless cut-and-paste operation, a footnote number linking to a different footnote that has nothing to do with the passage in question, or confusing, non-standard terminology for the field in quetion. Sometimes hyperlinks, whether because of improper formatting or negligence on the part of the publisher, don't go to the external sites they should. A spellchecker doesn't catch any of this.
Furthermore, even within ebook publishing, there is still a need for someone more computer savvy than the average author to have a look at the manuscript. For hyphenation to work correctly in next-generation e-readers (ditto for audiobook support), someone has to tag foreign-language words with the right ISO-639 tags. Image floating is still difficult to get right and requires some human intervention.
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.
You're right. But most of the rest of them got big-enough advances from record labels though so that they could try making music for a living for a couple years. The money for those advances came from record sales of the few acts that did make it. Now, there's little money coming in from record sales from the acts that made it - only peasly subscription revenue and $0.99 tracks. Less money coming into the labels, less money going out as advances to artists.
That actually isn't what Happend at all. You need to go further back than 1998.
Not to mention that your prices are way off - someone like Madonna gets $4-5 bucks an album, and that's the super-high end.
Cheap singles are nothing new. Singles drove the industry from the 60's through the 80's. Then labels slowly stopped releasing singles, forcing folks to buy an entire album for one song. This really hit the mainstream when Britney Spears first album, "...Baby One More Time". The title song was a huge radio and MTV hit, but it was unavailable as a single, and was only available when they finally dropped the album, forcing folks to buy the whole album to get the song (with the album filled largely with filler like "Email My Heart"). This resulted in an instant #1 album.
By holding back singles, they forced folks to spend much more on albums, which became standard practice - and it's no coincidence that this coincided with the rise of Napster because it was the only way folks could just get one single song without spending $15-20. It was a direct response to taking away choice from the market place.
There is a lot more to it before and after, but that's the basic gist - how the labels basically created the whole download environment by manipulating the market just as the technology became available to circumnavigate the entire thing. Since then they have played catch up and obviously largely lost in the long run.
This is also why your average AAA-list concert act sells tickets starting at $150-300 - because the record companies don't get a cut of that, and it's where they make the bulk of their money. Not that it hasn't always really been that way, of course.
Poetry dug its own grave. It's hard to have sympathy with them.
"Poetry is nobody's business except the poet's," wrote Philip Larkin, "and everybody else can fuck off."
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Piracy has trained consumers that music should be cheap.
In case you hadn't noticed, these days people expect EVERYTHING to be cheap. Well, except CEOs, anyway.
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.
You're right. But most of the rest of them got big-enough advances from record labels though so that they could try making music for a living for a couple years. The money for those advances came from record sales of the few acts that did make it. Now, there's little money coming in from record sales from the acts that made it - only peasly subscription revenue and $0.99 tracks. Less money coming into the labels, less money going out as advances to artists.
Having known musicians that have landed contracts, they do NOT give you enough to live on at all. They give you enough to get some new equipment, then gouge them with paying them for the studio, recording, editing, graphics, videos, etc. All which have to be pay back (and you are paying more if you would of found your own places to do that stuff).
And record companies are still making plenty of money selling stuff these days.
Be seeing you...
That's strange, there's so many sites like metacritic, reddit, and even slashdot that allow people to rate the content they view/read. Too bad this can't be applied to books.
And notice that despite hundreds of thousands of self-published books, it's not occurring now... Ever considered asking why?
Almost nobody is willing to spend 100-200 hours to find a single book worth reviewing. And, sadly, the very few people who might be willing to do so on an occasional basis are completely eclipsed by desperate authors who have friends "review" or purchase reviews or whatever.. (Not that they are necessarily common, but given how few reviews occur, even 1 in 100 authors means false reviews will eclipse real reviews 10 to 1.)
Closing your eyes and pretending that magic Internet pixies will happily do unpleasant work for free isn't working now. Why should it start working in the future?
(And if you are wondering why it works for music, the answer (1) the investment by the reader/listener is vastly smaller for music - I can listen to music for 3 minutes and decide if I like a piece, as opposed to 2-3 hours for a book and (2) much of the discovery occurs in venues where someone else is doing the filtering for the audience. Open mike nights with no filtering are marginal now. Imagine how they'd do if they featured a single unknown band playing for 2 hours... How many would be willing to sit for weeks to hear one band that was actually decent? (And remember, no talking with friends while listening. This music requires your undivided attention.)
Welcome to the challenges of self-publishing. Sadly, there's no magic here.