Amazon-Macmillan fight heats up: "Available everywhere except Amazon"
techflash.com
techflash.com
(And BTW, I'm a published author, and it doesn't matter to me how much Amazon sells my books for. They can pay people to take them off their hands for all I care. I get a fixed amount for every book sold. The publisher, not the author, loses out when Amazon wants the books to be cheaper. But of course, they don't really lose out -- there are a lot of benefits to being available from Amazon.)
But then, none I have wanted have been unavailable there.yet.
I love Amazon, I bought several of my christmas presents off of them and I've spent a small fortune with Amazon, however if they don't have what I want in stock I'm going elsewhere. I'm sorry, but if a brick-and-mortar store can have several copies in stock at several stores, why the hell doesn't Amazon have it?
If it's not listed for sale on Amazon with Prime shipping, I think long and hard how bad I need it. If it's out of stock, I'll wait to get it later (I've waited this long in life for it, what's a little longer).
My parents and friends thought I was nuts paying for Amazon Prime, but now many of them do the same thing after seeing how much of a convenience it truly is.
If it's not perishable, I get it from Amazon.
An industry wide boycott of Amazon for publishing books would devastate the company, and would be entirely legal. It would also render the kindle exceptionally useless if people can't buy bestsellers or virtually any genre titles available. Publishing houses have 100% exclusive control over the supply of bestsellers, which make up almost 80% of book sales annually.
The publishing industry is a very docile group and pulls none of the shit the music, movie and television industries pull. Poking a sleeping bear is a bad idea, and the publishing industry is a $40 billion dollar industry in the US alone, while Hollywood movies are a ~$50 billion dollar industry globally. The UK alone adds another ~$44 billion dollars to the publishing industries pocket (yes, Britons buy ~5 times more books than Americans).
Publishing is a gargantuan industry globally. I would seriously hate to see what would happen to Amazon as book sales attribute ~60% of their bottom line, meaning industry controlled best sellers likely make ~50% of their revenue and on $24 billion in sales, they're only posting <$1 billion net income.
The real issue is though that self-publishing means self-everything. Advertising, marketing, cover design, distribution; everything. You're turning a writer into a contractor, they either have to do everything themselves and take forever, or they have to sub-contract. As most writers are writers by choice it seems, quite frankly, moronic why anyone would think they'd want to be anything else. It took years for most authors to ever get published, so why would they ever accept a deal that meant they'd only spend 30% of their time doing what they wanted? They had that when they were doing a real job.
This isn't even concerning the major fact that all the talent is in the publishing industry already. Authors aren't going to be able to release the brilliantly edited books that are well marketed, distributed in multiple countries and often in multiple languages, with artistically designed covers. Doing all of those to a professional degree is as lucky as shooting yourself in the head and having no brain damage whatsoever despite a visible hole through your brain; I believe walking on water is more frequently reported.
Simply put a mass self-publishing route would inevitably end up with everything been done by the publishing industry, now retitled as the 'self-publishing' industry that takes an 85%-90% cut of your book sales. Only this way, you don't get an advance and you'll likely have to pay the 'self-publishing industry' thousands to get them to cover all the work in advance of any foreseen profits.
Essentially authors have the choice between the publishing industry where you can get paid anywhere between ~$5,000 and $2 million to write a book. Or you can choose 'self-publishing' where you'll likely have to pay a minimum of ~$50,000 to get quality editing, distribution, cover art and most costly of all marketing.
With $10,000 being an average advance in the industry for a first novel, who's going to pay $50,000 potentially for nothing? Especially considering that if you go with the industry, if your book doesn't sell a single copy they're out $90,000 plus the $10,000 they gave you and you are legally entitled to keep.
Right now the publishing houses don't buy out the first electronic publishing rights from the author or the electronic republishing rights. It's only going to be a matter of time before they do, which means authors advances will increase accordingly. If the publishing industry takes on the similar 70/30 to the author, then the advances could potentially increase dramatically if e-book sales really take off. However, again, after editing and marketing, this would likely be closer to 30/70 to the author.
Sure, there's still corner cases like it's much easier to store/carry/access/organise an eBook library than a paper book library, and delivery is intrinsically much faster, but I can't help thinking it's a huge fail on the part of the eBook market if they can't also push the massive production price per copy advantage they have.
Oh, and as an addition to that, region locking availability of eBooks is extremely frustrating as a consumer, but I assume that this is something the publishers are also forcing on Amazon? I bought Programming the Universe yesterday via Amazon, it initially wasn't available from Australia, but as I'm moving to Tallinn in a couple of days I just changed my address on amazon a little ahead of time and it immediately became available. It's these kind of tactics that force the market to just circumvent legitimate channels entirely.
Now here's the very crucial part for ebooks. Distribution costs, from what I have found out, are on average 10% of cover price. A whopping 40% on average goes to the retailer.
Less printing and distribution costs, a novel should still be selling for 80% of cover price when brand new (hardback equivalence). Macmillan likely isn't being greedy here, if people who read on eBooks want novels as soon as they hit the market, then they should by rights be expected to cover the costs.
The problem with rigid pricing is that a $10 charge for brand new and 2 year old material is insane. I've picked up mass market paperbacks at $6 without a discount, but brand new novels genuinely cost $30 and beyond. Even if Amazon waived 3/4 of their cut, without distribution and publishing costs, (50% off basically) it should still be selling for between $15 and $20 for a brand new novel.
An addendum to this is that all books are unique. The prices and costs vary, for example a cookbook is far more expensive to print than a simple paperback. Kindle, in my opinion, would hold great promise when a coloured e-ink is used(/usable) for selling graphic novels and comics on. They have far higher printing costs than anything else (minor editing of both writing and art), but already retail at reasonable prices (unless you're grabbing a Frank Miller A-3 sized bastard). Potentially it could take us back to comic books retailing at $1-$2 instead of like $10.
With the mass potential for region locking and other DRM's I don't believe eBooks are currently a good thing, and they're certainly not a friend to any prolific reader. I hand some of my read books out left, right and center to anyone who wants it. I remember my mum taking entire grocery bags full of books to her work (in a hospital) where the staff used to swap books. Where's the potential for this in eBooks?
With the Kindle being constantly connected to the internet, you would expect that a single eBook could be sent between Kindles without restriction quite easily. This would mean the only hurdle left for paper-like eBook usage would be the region locking, which again sounds like an exclusively Amazon made problem. I really don't see why a US publisher would care about region locking, electronic publication rights are handled as though the internet is one entity (so it isn't to enforce the authors rights to sell it in another country or anything), where as regular publication rights are exclusive to one territory (with the US and Canada being joint). I suppose there's potential in it to prevent it damaging paper book sales in foreign countries, however eBooks are currently tailing the market by many, many months so again, I have a hard time believing this is the publishing industries idea.
OK, that's totally snark. Let me try again: the traditional media industries are very incestuous in both intellectual and business senses. For example, the publishers' pretty much sole marketing resource is trying to get books approved by tastemakers like the NYT reviewers or to get them into the best sellers lists maintained by, again, the NYT. In return, they spend most of their advertising budgets doing big media buys at the same tastemakers.
Both sides think this is totally above board and would never influence reviewing decisions. Everyone knows that crass lucre only affects massive multinational companies in bad industries like pharma or cigarettes rather than good industries like journalism or media, after all.
Relatedly, both publishers and traditional media are mostly missing the boat with their online strategies, because they're wedded to the physical distribution model, the cost structure they've built to support it, and the revenue models dictated by that cost structure. They're largely resistant to disruptive innovation on top of that, despite the fact that it would present absurdly huge advantages to their business. (For example, upwards of 80% of sales of most books happen within a 3 month release window. That's insane for content that does not rot, but the publishing industry puts out so many books that it is impossible to physically stock them all, and the large channels rotate at a dizzying speed. If they were to embrace online distribution, aggressive crosspromotion, etc, they could still be selling appreciable amounts of books written in 1986. That is pretty close to free money -- they've already got the rights to the book and have long since paid their sunk costs on the book. There is just a massive organizational and cultural failure to take bold steps like this.
If Amazon starts squeezing the publishers, some of them might leave and open the door for niche competitors selling things at high prices that you can't get elsewhere. Once that happens, Amazon loses something important: That you don't ever have to go elsewhere.
So the fact that Amazon is so dominant and needs to stay dominant can be used against them. This gives publishers somewhat more leverage than you'd think.
So a savvy Marketplace user would realize the potential of stocking Macmillan books and selling them through Amazon to cater exactly to those users who want them but can't get them through Amazon.
Amazon would be more limited on the digital front, since that's a much trickier area, legally.
If it's not at amazon, I doubt I'll buy it anymore.