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

Re:"the market" = biz managers

[ColdWetDog]

You are over generalizing. There has been, and likely will be, a market for high quality entertainment - both written word, movies, music. A problem is that this market isn't especially large nor lucrative.

The big money is in mediocre crap. Always has been.

What the Internet has done is to throw everything together into a large fungible pool of confusion. And the big actors are well financed corps, not individual artists. Just like always.

It always has been a struggle for an artist of whatever stripe to make a living (at least while they're alive). There are the high profile exceptions, but the majority of artists don't make big bucks.

Re:More the economics of publishing

[Anonymous Coward]

There is literally too much content and most of it looks awful.

My problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity... --Cory Doctorow

Jack Conte, Nataly Dawn, Kickstarter, Patreon

[bmo]

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

The patreon model could really work

[gweihir]

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.