photo found on pubsoft.com
If you have been following the Hachette vs. Amazon saga, you might be excused for thinking it’s a battle between Heaven’s angels and Hell’s spawns. Depending on your source, Hell is either Amazon (assuming you’re reading newspapers and traditional media) or Hachette (if you’ve been on any Indie author’s blog).
Which is funny to me, because this is just another commercial disagreement: Hachette wants a fatter profit margin, and Amazon wants better prices, in order to cement its virtual monopoly. It can afford to sell cheaply, since it makes up for it by selling other products, too.
Amazon has been following the same policy of boxing together products for as long as I can remember. Its entire Kindle revolution – even its many detractors admit it has revolutionized ebook distribution, single-handedly building an entire new publishing sector – is based on the premise “buy the Kindle, so you can get any book.” The line between product and platform has never been blurrier, and Amazon likes it that way.
So, why all the drama?
I believe it’s because of the traditional publishers’ worry over losing the ebook battle. They have been in denial for ages, and now they overreact. And yet, it shouldn’t have to be this way. To explain my line of thought, we should agree on a few points:
- Traditional publishers won’t publish any kind of work they believe won’t be profitable.
- This makes them conservative when selecting titles to publish
- Indie authors, on the other hand, have faith in their work and are inherently experimental
- Amazon doesn’t care if every person in the world publishes their work on Kindle, since it costs it nothing to do so.
- The sheer volume of Indie titles, combined with their low prices, allow readers to become more adventurous in their choices
- At the same time, Indie authors have to go through a steep learning curve, that involves:
- honing their writing skills,
- learning the importance of marketing
- appreciating the difficulties of publishing
- Many Indie authors would jump at the opportunity to be traditionally published
- Therefore, traditional publishers should use Amazon like the NBA uses college basketball to coach the best players.
In effect, Amazon could become a huge training center for new authors. Once they have picked up the necessary skills and proven their profitability, most of them will be more than happy to sign on to the publishers’ teams, seeing it as a natural progression.
There will be those who have become so successful that they will prefer the freedom of keeping their own rights, but I believe that most authors will gradually be hybrid ones; self-publishing some of their work and publishing traditionally the rest. I mean, even Hugh Howey, often considered to be the number one Indie friend, does that. It makes perfect sense for both writers and publishers. It even allows publishers to experiment a bit: if a title has been profitable on Amazon, it should be profitable on paper, too.
As for authors, publishers might even be convinced to stop some of their most unsavory practices, such as paying the author once in a blue moon, keeping 90% of the profits and locking authors into idiotic contracts with non-compete clauses.
So, instead of looking at this in a short-term way, my suggestion to traditional publishers is this:
You can’t put the genie back into the bottle. What you can do, is use it in a way that will allow everyone to get rich. So, dig your head out of the sand and start thinking!
I agree with a lot of this. I think I was lucky enough to have got to the point of being able to write a publishable book before the indie thing hit – which was lucky. However, I quite like the slush pile for sale analogy. Not in a negative way but because there’s just no way, in a million years, that any publisher would by my books. For starters they’re sci-fi – which was definitely a pariah genre as far as the establishment was concerned when I started scoping publishers in 08 – and even worse, they’re funny. So for me, and people like me, for whom there was no real hope trad wise – unless we were really lucky, really good at sales and genius plus – the whole self publishing thing has been a godsend.
Personally, I love what Amazon have done but I’m not prepared to sign with them exclusively. I’ve only sold a handful of books elsewhere but I will still stick to my guns of putting my eggs in as many baskets as possible. I wonder, too if Amazon will always have a monopoly. After all, look at publishing, in 08 and 09 there were relatively few publishers and they were being gobbled up at an alarming rate by the borg of four and the small press was all but dead. Now we have am explosion of small presses and the smaller, more nimble, less snooty end of the spectrum is flourishing. Somewhere in there is the borg of tomorrow I suspect but for now, the world is looking interesting.
Cheers
MTM
It’s like that Chinese curse, “may you live in interesting times!” 🙂
Thanks for the great comment!
A pleasure! 🙂
I am so over the Amazon vs Hatchette thing.
A business wants their product in a store. Store wants to sell business’s product. Business doesn’t like the way store wants to sell it. Store says, ‘No businesses have to sell through our store.’ Business says (whines), ‘But we want our product on your shelves.’
Ugh, come to an agreement already.
I love your down-to-earth approach to the whole thing! So much healthier than mostly everything I’ve read so far on the subject…
Thanks for the comment! 🙂
I think you’re right, Nicholas, eventually there will be – has to be – a new model for publishing. What we’ve got right now is an us vs. them mentality which fails to provide optimal – or sometimes even acceptable – benefits for either party. I will be very curious to see how the industry evolves in the next five to ten years.
Exactly! I think that, for most people (and, certainly, the vast majority of readers), it will make no difference whatsoever. Pretty much everyone will follow a hybrod model, and that will be this war’s end… 🙂
You talk absolutely common sense and I agree wholeheartedly. Unfortunately, trad pubs are determined to own the whole cake and eat all of it, whereas Amazon wont even giveaway a crumb… and why should they? They made this cake what it is today and they baked it alone. It rose to perfection and all us Indies and readers have benefitted from its recipe. You have to compliment the chef, whatever side of the kitchen you stand on, lol!
Haha! I enjoyed writing that… food on the brain… Im sitting in a cafe drinking cappuccino right now… what I wouldnt give for a baklava, but theyre kinda hard to get hold of in Cavan
Lol – thanks. Now I’m hungry. What is Cavan?
Co Cavan is the area of Ireland where I live. Cavan is the main town, the ‘capital’ of Co Cavan… strangely, I mean you wouldnt guess, would you?
Ah, thanks! I’d love to visit sometime; I still feel guilty that I never got to visit Ireland, despite living in Edinburgh for so long!
I’ve been looking at Amazon publishing as the ‘open mic night’ for authors. I’m friends with a few aspiring actors, musicians, and comedians. We get into debates on who has it rougher to get a break. I tend to harp on the fact that authors have never had a stable platform to present their work to an audience without spending tons of money (Vanity Presses) like other art forms. The Kindle publishing seems to fill this void, which i think traditional publishers will start noticing soon.
I’m curious as to the reasons people are claiming Hachette is the ‘hell’ side. I haven’t come across that opinion yet.
This sounds a bit like a joke, doesn’t it? “A writer, a musician and a comedian walk into a bar…” 🙂
I agree with you; before Amazon changed the game, we would have been forced to spend an awful lot of money in order to get published. The barriers have now been lowered to the point that pretty much everyone can publish their book, for better or worse.
Hachette as the ‘hell’ side? There are some Indie authors who love Amazon so much for allowing them to self-publish, that have been a bit exuberant in their comments. Just human nature, and all that. 🙂
I think self-publishing is starting to balance itself out. It really was ‘everyone and their goldfish has a book’, but it feels like things are changing. Standards are appearing and readers aren’t as quick to grab the cheap books. Traditional publishers lowering prices has even caused a surge in Perma-Free books. Curious to see how the landscape looks at the end of the year.
Shouldn’t be surprised that there are a few die-hard Amazon followers.
I agree, that’s the impression I get as well. Half the advice posts I read, end up with a “be sure to use an editor prior to publishing” note. 🙂
I was planning on writing a post on how Amazon seems intent on raising the prices. They’ve implemented a number of small changes to their policies, that add up to significant pressure on Indies not to undersell.
I see those posts too and I’m in the middle now. I have an editor who has helped with my 3rd book and on. The first two were all me and beta readers. I couldn’t afford a real editor at the time. So, I think there should be a little leniency for new authors who don’t have the resources to got the professional help. This isn’t saying they should be given a pass, especially if they refuse to do even a simple spelling/grammar check. But I’ve seen a lot of torches and pitchforks get raised against those who would benefit more from some help.
This is the first I’ve heard about the pressure to not undersell. I think I’ve been in my own fantasy world for a while, so the business side has kind of passed me by the last few months.
There is this great line in the Tao Te Ching:
“When things reach an extreme,
they will turn into their opposite”
Like you, I only used a paid editor for my third book (The Power of Six) – although I had used dozens of beta-readers for Pearseus, and an editor friend, who refused to be paid. There is enough of a difference in the final product, though, that I’m now budgeting to rework the first two books and have them professionally edited and republished in July.
When you start out, it’s hard to decide how much of your time and money you’re willing to spend on something that no one may read…
I’m doing the same. Once we edit the books to a point where we have a long enough break, we’re going to fix up the first two. I’ll still have complaints because people perceive present tense as ‘wrong’, but it’ll be smoother. That’s a big benefit of Amazon publishing: you can upload a new version very quickly.
Very quickly, for free, and – the best part – everyone’s copy gets instantly updated to the new version! That alone goes a long way towards explaining my strong preference of publishing in digital format rather than paper… 🙂
Digital has certainly been my biggest (only) area of success. Though, I will admit a part of me would love to see a physical copy of my books on a shelf. At least if bookstores still exist by the time I get to that point.