Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal

nytimes.com

285 pointsGavinB86 comments

I've read various things from writers about Amazon's publishing deals. They have AmazonEncore, which republishes and promotes emerging authors and mid-listers with self-published novels, giving them an extremely generous (compared to the Big NY Five) cut of the proceeds for every book sold on Kindle.

Of course, for indie publishers in general, if you sell your ebook for over US$2.99 in the Kindle bookstore, you keep 70%. Same with Nook Bookstore. Seth Godin self-publishes by this method. Stephen King publishes short stories and novelas through Kindle Singles, a more curated kindle publishing vehicle that publishes short essays, longer journalistic pieces, and short fiction that gives authors a 70% cut regardless of the author's set price.

Being the #1 bookseller and ereader manufacturer is faring very well for Amazon.

It's not bad for a lot writers, either, so far, at least compared to traditional publishing. I wrote a longish post on the subject: http://jseliger.com/2011/10/17/on-amazon-signs-up-authors-wr... which explains why I might end up as one of those self-published writers: it's not just the economics of publishing right now, but the difficulty of even getting published at all if you're a classic outsider. The desperate will use whatever cheap and quick methods they can to get their work out there. Yeah, 99% of that work will be lousy, but the unrecognized good stuff will be there too.

More and more, the middlemen in every industry are starting to realize just how irrelevant they are.

Amazon's not a middleman?

Of course they are, they just happen to be the biggest one, capable of eating all the others.

There have always been two levels of middle men in the book business. The publishers and the sellers. This eliminates one big middle man.

By calling them middlemen, you're implying that publishers add no value to the end product. That's a misconception: an author writes a manuscript, a publisher makes it into a book. Often, it takes as much time and effort to turn a manuscript into a book as it took the author to write the manuscript.

As more writers choose to self publish ebooks, it's becoming quite clear how crucial the role of a publisher is. Most of those self produced 'books' are completely unreadable.

Charlie Stross explained it well: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/02/cmap-2-h...

Also, Amazon isn't taking publishers out of the equation. It's becoming one.

Everyone who voted the parent comment down because it offended their groupthink should read the forwards of a few books. Authors constantly sing the praises of editors who helped them get their books into shape. Good producers do the same thing to music.

This meme that there are no benefits to professional production is demonstrably stupid. If you're unable to leave it on Reddit or Slashdot where it belongs, at least have the courtesy not to mod down people who say otherwise.

There is no question that services like editing are valuable and necessary. The salient question seems to be why authors don't hire their own editors, rather than overpay for the service as part of an unattractively-priced bundle of related services from a publishing house.

Right. Editors provide a valuable service, but there's no reason that needs to be bundled with the other "services" provided by publishers, most of which have become or are becoming irrelevant, particularly, IMO, the functions of providing capital and risk pooling. A traditional publisher would provide an author with a (usually small) advance on royalties to live on while writing the book (think of it as a payday loan in terms of financial soundness and you'll have the right idea there), front the money to print and distribute the book (a significant amount when you're talking paper), and assume the risk that the book would tank or that the author would flake out and not finish the book. They could do that because they'd pool the risk across a large number of books. If the editorial decisions about what to publish were sound overall, the publisher could make a profit despite losing money on individual books.

The cost of "printing" and distribution is headed toward zero and editing, cover art, and services can be purchased. That basically leaves (from the author's perspective) "source of short-term loans under very bad terms" as the only remaining function, but, you know, there are other places that provide those. :-)

It is more an equity investment in the book product than a payday loan, as there is no obligation to repay if sales are bad. Or you can regard it as the publisher creating a limited liability company for each book that pays the author. It is much like VC financing for a product company in terms of the model, although the payoffs are usually distributed a little differently.

So the essential part of the publisher reduces to a provider of domain-specific loan insurance, where their knowledge of the industry and evaluation of the commercial prospects of your writing informs the risk premium that is charged.

Sounds like there might be an emerging market for independent expert editors who work directly for self-published authors. If an author gets 70% back on each Kindle sale, she can afford to send some percentage of that to her editor. The author gets high quality editing and the editor gets a continuous income stream.

The publisher is a very odd beast -- the services you are citing as their primary benefit are the kind you would expect an author with money to simply pay for themselves.

Or to put it another way, publishers are a combination of:

1. Angel investors / Talent scouts (insert moneyball reference here)

2. Labor pool for book completion (cover design, editing, etc)

3. Marketing assistance

4. Physical printing

5. B2B marketing to get printed books on bookshelves.

Five distinct businesses. Why are they commonly grouped? My guess is a combination of most authors not being very business oriented / not wanting to not think about these sorts of things (30%), and most authors not having the money to hire their own #2 (the other 70% of the story).

Amazon already has a product for #5 on its own, and a separate product providing #4 and #5 together. This story is about them adding on the #1-#2-#3 punch that is currently the exclusive domain of publishers.

Stross is a technical and successful guy -- he should probably just hire his own #2 and #3, and then use amazon's #4 and #5 service. He probably won't, out of loyalty to the angel investor that pulled him out of obscurity (or the contract his angel made him sign...), but hopefully future Strossi will!

You have to think about it from the author's perspective. Many authors are not interested in the minutiae of the process, and the publisher serves as a single point for the author. There's no need to deal with a separate person for market and a separate person for physical distribution. There is a value (albeit small for some people) to bringing the disparate pieces together into a single package, freeing the author from the need to handle these pieces.

FWIW: I wish the people performing this service in the financial industry weren't gouging customers ...

Vertical integration existed before Steve Jobs hit the big time.

My mother was a self-publisher and also ran a bookstore. She published books for a few others as well, and would constantly run into the misconception that publishing is just about taking the words from the author and giving them to the printer. Publishing is quite resource-intensive (not to say that the big publishers don't also engage in shennanigans)

Similarly, my housemate's mother worked as an editor for a long time. My favourite quote of hers was "You know how they say everyone has a book in them? It's simply not true."

I don't think that calling somebody a 'middleman' implies that they add no value. The vast majority of middlemen add value: repackaging for local markets, translating, navigating bureaucracies, advertising, shipping, placing the product in stores and generally connecting producer with consumer.

I wrote that calling publishers 'middlemen' implies that they add no value to the end product.

"Navigating bureaucracies, advertising, shipping, placing the product in stores and generally connecting producer with consumer" add no value to the end product.

Repackaging and translation for local markets do add value to the end product, but those aren't activities one thinks of when mentioning 'middlemen'. Those services would typically be performed by a localization consultant, hired by the importer.

Merriam-Webster defines 'middleman' as:

An intermediary or agent between two parties; especially : a dealer, agent, or company intermediate between the producer of goods and the retailer or consumer

An importer is higher up the chain, acting as an intermediate between the manufacturer and the distributor.

I think timjahn was trying to say something like:

THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE

...Highlander!

Amazon was quoted in the article as saying that the only two important parties in publishing are the writer and the reader. Of course it was hard to understand that statement, blocked as it was by Amazon's foot in its mouth.

Amazon is a plattform. Not a middleman.

Woha, -3 without a comment. Amazon for sure will add complete self service. Not sure what other HNers think, but for me there is a difference between a service plattform and a middle man.

E.g. take real estate websites. They are not a middleman, they are not a real estate agent. There is a significant difference between a plattform and middlemen. Real estate websites did not add a new middleman when replacing real estate agents.

This is enforced by Amazon emphasizing that there are only authors and readers.

FWIW I agree with you. I think your point is similar to the old library vs framework debate (http://ifacethoughts.net/2007/06/04/difference-between-a-lib...)

Library/Toolkit = Platform = Amazon's usual play. They give people the tools needed to succeed at something.

Framework = Middle-man = Publishers. They take a well defined contribution from an author and try to succeed on behalf of the author.

Seems correct to me.

Actually, you never stop needing a middleman. The problem in most industries is that positions become traditional. People fill them out of habits, because that's always how it's been. Since most organizations just usually adopt the status quo, nobody questions the veracity of the setup.

We end up with obsolete layers that end up just inflating costs. As long as these old timers have a way to make a buck and don't feel threatened, they don't see the need to optimize or redefine their industry.

It's good to have the likes of Apple, Google and Amazon rattling some cages from time to time.

As I said, you always need a middleman, but you need to identify what that middle is and redefine your business around it. To stay at the top you also need to monitor your industry to know when that middle shifts to something else. Currently, I believe that editing and reviewing would be a key service in the publishing industry. It's all nice to make books cheaper, but I think I value my time more than I value my money in this instance. I'm willing to pay for my books, but I'd still like for someone to vet them.

Barnes & Noble's has a publishing house of their own for a while; I'm surprised it's taken Amazon this long.

Amazon has been launching imprints for the last year or so, including romance imprint Montlake Romance, thriller imprint Thomas & Mercer, and most recently sci-fi imprint 47North. Nothing new here, this article has been a long time coming.

Books are great - and certainly more cost effective for someone like Amazon to go straight to the content creators.

I would like to see them do the same with music and video, but that costs a bit more to produce. There are a number of middlemen out there that need stronger competition from alternate sales channels. Big NY publishers are just a subset of incumbents holding on to a dying business model that need a good shot of disruption.

They've started Amazon Studios which is already heading down the road of competing with other Hollywood production companies.

At what point does this end up touching anti-trust?

I've always been amazed that all the publishers never got together and said "let's build our own web store". I understand that it's not simple, but the alternative is to have Amazon disintermediate you at some point.

Why did the record labels not put together a RIAA-controlled iTunes well before Apple did? Or the movie studios an MPAA download store before Netflix?

One, they've got a lot invested in the current model, which is primarily priced around selling medium rather than content - http://www.paulgraham.com/publishing.html. Two, they've spent years learning to compete and regard their biggest threats as each other. They're not culturally equipped to work together to combat a transformational challenge.

RIAA didn't want music delivered electronically, and iTunes got them over that hump. They could not have thought of that themselves. However, an online book store selling the same products you have for a hundred years is a much easier sell. You aren't harming your existing business, you're extending it from publishing to distribution and sales. That's just vertical integration - quite well-understood as a business technique.

The tricky part is the touchy-feely web aspect (since that they understand publishing and are very close to distribution already). So given the amount of money they stand to lose, I have no doubt they could have made it work. Undercut the prices everyone else has to charge and you create a serious incentive for people to try you out, forgive your mistakes and give you 5 years to slowly figure out how to perfect the model.

This had to happen sooner or later. I can't help but feel sad at how some content owners have been sticking to old school technology for decades without trying out new opportunities.

Publishers will soon be replaced with such 'distributors' soon. Today its books, tomorrow someone will come along and do this to the music industry.

I've been reading about the imminent death of publishers for a while now, but I don't think they're ever going to disappear completely. And I run a site for writers that processes hundreds of manuscripts daily.

People like to make the comparison of the inevitable democratization of books to how the internet changed the music industry, but that's just not an apt comparison.

Books cannot be consumed in the same way as music. Pop songs are usually 2-3 minutes long, and an entire album clocks in at half an hour to an hour. Generally you can listen to a few songs from a band and make a decision as to whether you like their style and want to buy the album on the spot. Books aren't like that. A reader must often invest a significant amount of time--days--before it becomes clear that a book is or isn't good. Publishers provide the extremely valuable service of validation. If you get your book published up by Random House, then the reader at the store can say, if absolutely nothing else, that a group of well-read professionals thought your book was good enough to warrant stamping with their brand and spending money polishing and marketing. You just can't say that about 99% of self-published material, and when it can take days for a reader to determine quality, that distinction becomes important.

And, despite what many would lead you to believe, publishers provide a valuable service besides validation. They take a raw manuscript and polish it up to professional standards. The manuscript is only part of the finished product that we call a book. You also need cover art, which is your book's first impression and incredibly important--not something you want to leave to your 18-year-old nephew with a cracked copy of Photoshop. You need typesetting, which is still important in the digital world: how many middle-aged writers know--or want to learn--HTML/CSS? You need editing. Having run a site for writers I can guarantee you that an author's perfect final manuscript is still filled with typos, mistakes, and ripe for polishing from a trained professional. You need marketing: the best book in the world won't get read if nobody knows it exists. The truth is that writers are good at writing, but often not that good at all of the other aspects of publishing a book. A big publisher takes that off their hands and handles it in a professional way.

I suspect that the people who say publishers are dead have themselves never picked up a random indie author's book from Amazon. If they had, they'd realize that not every author is Amanda Hocking or Scott Sigler. In fact they'd probably realize that what they just read was filled with typos, had shitty cover art, maybe had greater structural problems like weak characterization, and likely was priced just about right at 99 cents.

If anything, the death of publishers could be very dangerous, because when young new readers start getting burned by crappy self-published books, they'll get turned off to reading and we'll have lost yet another generation to TV and fast media.

The fact that some publisher has published a book provides abosolutely zero validation to me. I choose the books I read based on:

- the author: did I previously enjoy their works?

- awards: a Hugo/Nebula nomination is huge validation

- reviews: professional or bloggers or Amazon's.

I'm not talking about a reader browsing some books and picking one based on the publisher's mark. I never really do that myself either. The "validation" I'm referring to is much more subtle: the mere fact that a book is in print and in a major bookstore--i.e. it has been picked up by a publisher--IS that validation. Because anyone can now publish themselves to the Amazon book store, that implicit validation will now become explicit as readers who start picking up indie authors realize they need someone to sort through the dreck for them.

And again, I'm not just talking about a bad book--because you can get those from major publishers too--I'm talking about a certain standard of quality. Even bad books are usually typo-free, reasonably typeset, and so on. With self-published authors flooding the market, there will soon be (or already is!) a new bottom-rung of bad quality that previously didn't exist, because it was a publisher's job to weed out or fix such books.

Up until today, all of us have unknowingly and implicitly been relying on the publisher's validation when buying 95% of books at a store, because without that validation they wouldn't BE in the store. That's what I'm talking about.

"readers who start picking up indie authors realize they need someone to sort through the dreck for them."

Right, but you don't need a publisher to do that. Algorithms are great at it.

> Right, but you don't need a publisher to do that. Algorithms are great at it.

Not at finding factual mistakes.

> I'm not talking about a reader browsing some books and picking one based on the publisher's mark.

I have. Killed a few hours in a Barnes & Noble the other week. Every single book on the shelves was drivel, except for the Dover and Penguin titles. (Which I bought a couple of.)

The validation is being in the bookstore, not whether the book is self-published or not.

I'm willing to bet that if a self-published book is in the bookstore it will be better than 90% of the books in the bookstore because it means that somebody in the bookstore explicitly chose to stock that book rather than being the shovelware drivel that the publisher "recommended" they stock.

If you even know what a Hugo/Nebula nomination is, you're an anomaly.

Unfortunately.

(Says a guy who (a) has some, and (b) has seen precisely what they've done to his sales -- i.e. nothing.)

For what it's worth, I can't remember what caused me to start reading your books, but it probably was your awards.

I read a lot of books on my Kindle, and I've even gone down the route of publishing a few self-published books.

You are absolutely right when it comes to self-published books, they are not as polished as the professionally published ones. It can be jarring to read a book and have a million grammatical and spelling errors.

However, you have to realize that my investment in self-published books is significantly lower. They are usually much cheaper, they are updated (I think) more frequently, and they get the job done.

Frankly, I like having both options around!

Validation is the same as aggregation, right? A valuable service, certainly.

Cover art? Sure, valuable for a paper book, but for e-books? I'm not so sure. And as a first impression? Maybe in the old world where you browse through a book store. Again, not so sure in the future, when I let others do the browsing for me. But, let's say it's still valuable.

Editing? Obviously valuable. Will continue to be.

Typesetting? Probably not as valuable in the future. Also, I don't really understand how this hasn't been automated already.

Even if all of these things are valuable on their own, do they need to be done by one entity? If I'm a writer, and I believe in my work, why would I sell my soul to a publisher instead of hiring an editor I trust, an artist whose work I like?

Maybe some people will prefer the one-stop shop of a big publishing house, but it seems to me that there's simply a lot of inefficiency there waiting for a small, decentralized players to disrupt.

I'd argue that cover art is still important even in the digital age. Humans are visual creatures, and your first impression of a book is always the cover. Whether you like it or not, many people will always judge books by their covers.

Digital typesetting is actually still a difficult thing to do. The state of ereader rendering engines is comparable to the browser wars circa IE5. Each ereader family has different attributes it does and doesn't support, and sometimes they support the attributes in different ways. (For example, on a Kindle, text-align: center will reliably center text. On a Nook, text-align:center is applied BEFORE text-indent, so if try to center indented text, it won't look right). At this point in the game you still need a professional if you want your book to look perfect on every major platform.

Even if an author wanted to individually outsource each of these aspects, they would have to first research the market, find the right people, negotiate prices, take a risk on quality, manage every aspect of that, and so on. Writers are busy writing. Many don't have the time or inclination to learn the intricacies of the professional publishing business just to save a few bucks.

There are already some services that take care of all of that for you--bookbaby for example--but at that point you're still self-publishing, without the implicit validation that I think is the most important part for readers.

Eyup. Self-published books are a real roll of the dice on Amazon.

While the existing publishing industry may collapse, publishers/editors will still exist - they will have to exist for a good book to be createdd.

Or, this could lead to the birth of a decentralised web-of-trust review and recommendation system. Imagine if something like this works: When a person reads a book, he rates it according to his taste. He would also rate how much he "trusts" the opinion of any of his peers. Then, for any book, he could ask the question "How good do my peers think this book is?" or "How good does the faculty of University of Manchester School of Computer Science collectively think this book is?" This then propagates the ratings of this group, and the ratings of the people they "trust", to come up with an answer. The amount of trust can act as some sort of a coefficient at each step.

Now, instead of saying "a group of well-read professionals, picked and chosen by Random House, thought this books was good enough," you can say "a group of people, whom I trust to be well-read professionals, or to have good taste, or to be accurate, or to be knowledgeable in their field, thought this books was good."

The technology is there, and frankly I won't be surprised if someone already wrote something like this.

BTW, this isn't limited to books. You can substitute "book" with academic paper (and you get peer review!), films, music, or pretty much anything provided by a social-web recommendation service,

Unfortunately what you get with this system ends up looking like Amazon's reader reviews, because most readers are neither perceptive nor trained in analytical reading.

Viz: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/01/faint-pr...

That's not what I was proposing. The whole point is that you select who you trust and how much you trust them for any given subject. A random reviewer like the one on Amazon wouldn't have much influence on my rating unless I "trust" them personally, or some one I highly trust in turn highly trusts them.

I'm saying trust too much now.

That, however, throws the effort from publishers to readers without lessening it as much as one would like. I can see specialized audiences investing the time required to get a web of trust going, but not mass audiences. Mass audiences, when contemplating "is this any good?", don't usually go for "I know, I'll rate how much I trust a bunch of people that I know or know of and algorithmically consult their opinions!" They go for "probably not." This is the parallel to how, when you're creating a new web site, your enemy is less the competition and more the Back button. So there are serious network-effect problems with this proposition - it has big barriers to entry. I would love to partake of its benefits, because they sound awesome, but I think that you're underestimating how difficult it would be to get this off the ground.

This may be the final death knell for the publishing industry but it also indirectly provides a clear description of how Internet empowered businesses can be fatally disruptive. The quote that has to be burning holes in the stomachs of publishing pros everywhere comes from Amazon executive Russell Grandinetti: “The only really necessary people in the publishing process now are the writer and reader,” he said. “Everyone who stands between those two has both risk and opportunity.”

http://g2li.me/ppkHhM

Why do I suddenly get the sense that no amount of stimulus funding is going to solve the structural unemployment issue in the USA? We appear to have crossed the technology Rubicon, whereupon the ratio of jobs created to jobs destroyed by technology becomes less than unity. The Luddite fallacy only holds true as long as the ratio is above or at unity.

Interesting times.

That's been true for a looong time. Remember when offices had typing pools and messenger boys?

http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_on_institutions_versus_...

I agree that it won't be fixed by stimulus - but it's because I believe that the current system is undergoing a form of violent restructuring, where current institutions and platforms are fighting for their survival against a tidal shift that's moving from a society dominated by centralized, few, powerful institutions, to decentralized, numerous, systems and platforms of democratic organization.

I think what makes technology an always doubted, yet positive, force is that the rate of change and the instability it causes makes short term guesses easier to make successfully than longer term ones. For example, at the birth of the cell-phone, it's easier to predict that this new tech will kill off the pay-phone industry than it is to predict the future coming of the iPhone, or app stores, or the market 3d cell-phone cameras. It's easier to look at the current landscape, and predict how this new tech will damage it, than it is to look at a blank slate, and predict what of an infinite number of possibilities will actually work in the newly created space.

It's also easy to step back until something good comes of it, focus on just the good, and ignore the bad.

Take your cell phone example. Cell phones are allowing the government to track the location of all it's citizens. Without a warrant in some cases. If somebody would have predicted that back when cellphones were introduced, people would have laughed them out of town. It was a ludicrous and paranoid idea. Yet here we are. We sit around watching videos, liking Facebook comments, and checking in at various events, all while a critical part of our anonymity has been destroyed.

I'm not saying it's all bad. I'm saying there is a mix. If you ask me, I'd rather not have cell phones and have a more private life. No amount of slick packaging and voice control interfaces is going to make up for what I've lost. But we don't have to choose, of course. We can have our cake and eat it too.

What's happened is that technology is staying leaps and bounds ahead of politics. It's like we're having to re-engineer the social contract every couple of decades or so. And the yahoos we have in power around the world are much more interested in their petty political games than this seismic shift that's occurring under them (which, in all honesty, they probably don't understand and probably couldn't deal with anyway). So the system gets more and more out of whack.

Just wanted to balance what you were saying. This isn't a story of technology always making things better even though we sometimes doubt. It's a story of technology making things more complicated and making the individual more powerful in some ways and that having effects that we poorly understand.

I completely agree with you, it's definitely easy to filter the evidence in favor of or against new technology to make a point, or to satisfy a worldview. I also agree that every new technological advancement offers the possibility to use it for both good and bad purposes.

I think what I was trying to say to the original commenter was what you've offered me, which is a balance to the argument that new technology will have an inherently good or bad effect on the world.

I probably mis-represented my opinion by overstating the positive effects of tech - I think my real point was that most kinds of change begin with negatives - and that the reason people continually doubt technology or seem to overplay the negatives is due to it's ever-changing nature. Not that it will inevitably lead to something good and the bad part is just a hiccup - it's just easier to predict the short-term bad than it is to predict the long term good.

This is like saying that no amount of firebombing is going to solve the problem of forest fires in the US. Excess government spending doesn't create jobs or "stimulate" the economy. Japan tried it for nearly 2 decades and barely survived.

The current state of the global or American economy proves absolutely nothing about technology or the equilibrium level of structural unemployment. Similarly, the boom of the late 1990s did not prove that it had become possible to start a profitable company without a business plan or means of revenue, it was merely a temporary state, not a steady state condition.

I think the issue is the shift of jobs away from unskilled labour towards skilled. Up until recently there were plenty of jobs for people without an academic ability, those jobs have either gone or are going. At the moment we seem to be brushing this problem under the carpet, sooner or later we are going to have to deal with it.

Finally. Now somebody just needs to do this for academic papers that taxpayers pay for and leech publishers profit from.

http://www.plos.org/

My father (about 5+ years ago when itunes was picking up steam) thought Apple would sign Madonna and several other big artists and start producing music themselves. I guess he was just off by brand name and a good number of years ahead of the curve with the idea, but its exciting to see this change happening.

Next in the list is Music Labels. Go Digital Companies.

I wonder if there could be a model where an author releases a "beta" version of their book at a cheaper price and then "fixes" suggested by readers are then released for free to those who bought the original. A kind of group editing. A later version 1 could be released at a higher price for those who don't want to deal with errors.

These days, a lot of writers write alpha versions as blog posts. Commenters and other bloggers provide suggestions of fixes.

I think publishers will still have a lot of strength in niche areas/specialization, areas in which Amazon can't effectively scale. That is, unless it starts recruiting editorial staff or begins partnering with smaller publishers in those areas.

Amazon is an old-fashioned monopolist. When dealing with these beasts they are your friend until it is more profitable for them not to be.

JK Rowling does not require Amazon but Amazon will never produce another JK Rowling because they will not do the marketing and groundwork necessary.

Authors are investing in their future when choosing commercial partners. By partnering with Amazon they could be putting all their eggs in one basket, this is not necessarily a bad thing to do but it does require that you watch that basket very carefully.

> implying JK Rowling was produced by a publisher

Source? You don't think JK would have produced at the same quality with a different publisher? Or if she had borrowed money, paid her own editor, and self-published?

She was famously flat broke, I doubt she could have borrowed money or done any of the other things to get traction. What she got from her publisher was marketing, contacts, distribution of review copies ... (it certainly wasn't editing).

Big famous authors are not going to go with Amazon, they can self publish (c.f. Zappa, Radiohead). Smaller authors are not going to get effort put into them and are better off buying lottery tickets than relying on Amazon for career development. The people do who do the work Amazon won't do? Publishers.

Amazon will never produce another JK Rowling

Yes they can. They don't need a widely popular children book about magic and wizards that gets lots of children excited. All they need are loads of books to sell that people want to buy.

Will Amazon shut down their eBook business if JK Rowling doesn't sign up? No. That should tell you how much Amazon need JK Rowling.

It's EASIER for Amazon produce a JK Rowling.

You sign up 10-100-1000 childrens writers, it costs you almost nothing. Then if one of them starts to get any traction through reviews, blogs, slashdotting etc you can very quickly and easily promote the hell out of them by simply putting them on the front page of Amazon.com or pushing suggested books at your customers.

Compare that to traditional publisher - it has to pick one author and spend a lot of time and money sending them on signing tours, book shop promotions, getting reviews in the NYT. So they have to spend 90% of it's money on the existing big names to be sure of a return.

Marc's on the game

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405311190348090457651...

Hello, obvious future!

They're using their platform to get into publishing, not making the industry obsolete as the title (and the article) imply.

Traditional publishing is the scurviest thing you'll ever meet in a lifetime. Basically, in traditional publishing you do:

The writing. The editing. The marketing.

...and they pick up 98 percent of the profits, if any. With self-publishing (not just amazon) typically over 50 percent off the bottom goes to the author. This is an absolute necessary change to the industry. It will result in 2 or 3 fewer JK Rowlings, but 100s of thousands fewer outrages.

I do not know what experience you have with traditional publishing, but Charles Stross (cstross here on HN) wrote a series of blog posts[1] that explain rather in detail the benefits of publishing through a traditional publisher instead of doing it yourself. It isn't nearly so tangibly one-sided as you would suggest.

[1] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/common-m...

I read Charlie's posts too, this is an area I am really interested in, and I think he missed out on a number of things.

As with any business there are 'good' publishers and 'bad' publishers, and the Amazon move (and others like it) could lead to less friction in the publishing business which will certainly boost quantity but it may (as Charlie posits) negatively effect quality as well.

The future may end up being 'karmic gods' to coin a phrase, kind of like kingmakers of old but people or organizations which, by applying a seal of approval or blessing on a work can immediately levitate it above the sea of choices, which will replace what 'publishers' do today. These people may appear to be 'super - Agents' as I've heard them referred to or 'pressless publishers' (a take on fabless semiconductor companies which already have a model that works well for them).

We should see artisan printers arising. Its a new business where you work with an author/agent to have exclusive right to put into physical form a work, perhaps leather bound on acid free paper or glue bound onto newsprint.

Amazon has an excellent chance of continuing to disrupt here and kill publishers outright. Certainly the disruption in the market is going to move around where the money goes and it will affect the net total value of a given work. Much of that value may simply disappear (which is to say authors make more and consumers pay less but a giant middle-industry no longer exists so those folks don't get salaries and their suppliers don't sell product etc etc). The economics of information march relentlessly on.

In 2011, all the big publishers are pressless publishers. They don't edit books. They don't print books. They don't write books. They don't market books.

They just fund books, at terms which would shock the conscience if they weren't so well-established. (If a book was a startup, the typical offer is something like "We'll put in $5k at a pre-money valuation of $1k and, by the way, we're going to claw that $5k back, too. Also, we're going to contractually lock you up from talking to other investors for your next three companies. You owe it to us, because we're rescuing you from not being published.") I will not mourn their passing, as either a reader or an oft-suggested author.

So true. I know someone that self-published a book and made a few thousand dollars with that first edition. That small success ended up a contract with a large publisher for the second edition. She did all the writing, editing and DTP. The publisher took care of the cover and the printing. She did not get an advance from them since she was unknown and, several years later, she still did not earn a single penny from that second edition.

It's not exactly 98% of the profits; but, it still seems egregious.

From what I've noticed, royalties are generally about 10% of gross against advances (if any), or $1 on a $10 soft-cover. The publisher spends money on the acquisition, editing, printing, and distribution; in brick-and-morter land, this isn't cheap. Remember that the store needs to make a couple of bucks, too.

Additionally, major retailers include a buyback clause—if the book doesn't sell, the retailer can sell up to something like 15% of the initial purchase order back to the publisher. The publisher often forwards your share of that burden into your royalty payment schedule.

Though, ultimately, while authors might get screwed financially in a lot of ways, publishing does, as a consumer, keep a lot of crap out of your purchasing decisions. Publishers (on the whole) do provide a lot of value to you: are you going to buy Gruen's AWESOME guide to Ruby or The Ruby Programming Language from O'Reilly Publishing with its venerable woodcut cover treatment?

If you're trying to get your work out there (which is why people write in the first place) you're probably willing to take the traditional publishing deal.

The annoying thing about being charged for returns is that you have no control over how many are ordered. When my book Ruby in Practice went to stores, I felt like there were FAR too many copies going out. Lo and behold, tons of them came back and now I'm eternally on the hook for the cost of those even though I had zero input into how many were actually produced and distributed.

Publishers are helpful, but the game is inextricably rigged in their favor, which sucks.

Author contracts are the worst. Agents can help, but unless you're at scale, their cost/benefit is a wash.

We should compare notes.

From what I've noticed, royalties are generally about 10% of gross against advances (if any), or $1 on a $10 soft-cover.

More like $0.50 on a $10 soft-cover--the wholesale discount is likely somewhere between 40 and 55%.

You are exactly right, hardcover/softcover is generally somewhere between 40 and 60%, I used to work at a receiving area of a bookstore and most commonly the discount was normally in that ballpark.

Another thing folks don't notice: You write the book once (generally). It's done. Signed off. Time to kick back. The editing is done. But dealing with the storage, distribution, reprinting and so forth goes on for sometimes decades. All you do is sit back and collect royalties - no need to manage storehouse monkeys, provide payment portals for hundreds of little retailers, so on and so forth.

Who is the --AA of the publishing industry, obviously they have far few legal protections for their schemes.

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