e-books and the amazon saga

[davefreer]

A great deal has been said about the battle between Amazon and Macmillan and the role of Apple's new reader and agency model (which BTW generally leaves authors poorer - and is superficially not good for publishers either.) What hasn't really been said is WHY it's such a big fight. The nearest some people have come is 'it's about control' and 'e-

Comments

[davefreer]

:-)fortunately there is still a lot of dewy eyed innocence among editors and even publishers. And some idealism too.

[haikujaguar]

Wow, great analysis! Thanks for writing it up.

[davefreer]

Yes well... less clear is how readers and writers can break free of what is intrinsically a narrowing of the offering. (People keep telling me there are more books out there. Yes, there are - but less choice is actually easily available. The curve between bestseller and 'other' has got steeper and more abrupt - in an era when people (and their reading tastes) have become more diverse - ie. the two are work in opposite directions. There has to be a way away from this situation, which is bad for reading and writers. At the moment my best hope is shortsighted greed will lead publishers to overprice bestsellers to the point where they offer gaps to other people. Or that someone works out it's about visibility, but that you need a measure of 'true popularity' (free of something like name-recognition, covers, distribution factors etc.) to apply an increase in visibility to.

[qbzzt]

Word of mouth marketing goes by a lot faster on the Internet. Part of the trick would be to produce collateral that makes it easy for readers to market your book. Trailers we can post on facebook, pictures, etc.

Maybe the future will not be books as books, but a complete multimedia experience, involving a book, songs, pictures, and video. You hook people with one, and get them interested in the others.

[reverancepavane]

A local specialty bookstore owner once commented to me that he could quite happily run his business on just the standing orders for the media tie-in novels (Star Wars, Star Trek, Babylon 5, etc). All the rest was just gravy. So you definitely have a point.

[reverancepavane]

I still think my favourite comment about the publishing industry was when the outside business analyst, upon learning that the vast majority of income came from a dozen or so books each year, suggested that the company only publish those books that they know will be best-sellers.
One thing that has gotten me curious is how the perpetual nature of an ebook interacts with the typical mid-list contract. After all, since the ebook distribution costs effectively don't scale with volume there is nothing to prevent an ebook remaining perpetually "in print" (or at least until Disney's pet senators die and copyright finally expires with them). Whereas with physical inventory there was always a limit to how long a book would actually exist. Was there ever the expectation in the typical contract that rights revert when a book is "out of print"?
One nice thing to see in a lot of the informed commentary over this battle between apatosaurus and allosaurus is the amount of positive press engendered by Baen's webscription scheme and how it handles

[davefreer]

True. Baen have got a good mench nearly everywhere out of this. Now let's see if that translates into sales.

[reverancepavane]

Ooops. Just realised my first paragraph could be seriously misinterpreted quite easily. Change "know" to "predict with their crystal ball" and "books" to "new books" in order to translate the intent more accurately from cynical Ianese into more traditional English.

[paulcory]

I look at your numbers and see a case for eBooks opening more opportunities for authors. If you can stand the optimism and misplaced faith in publishers' greed, read on

[davefreer]

The time factor - long tail really IS a major factor I agree. But the 20% figure is one major publishing company (guess which ;-)) whereas a number of others are paying 20% too... OF NETT - ie LESS than 15% of retail price which they used to get for hardcover (a lot of companies are shifting that too.) Now, I've been paid bonuses (in another industry) on nett before. Weirdly no matter how well you do the nett figure is very very low. The latest is that in a fit of crumb tossing after beating amazon into an agency system Macmillan (who only survived because of their authors are talking about maybe raising that to 25% of Nett (which in practice will equate to 12.5 - 14% of retail ie still less than hardcover, although there are no variable costs and the retailer cut is actually lower too. Generosity itself! Gratitude even.)

[qbzzt]

I think you're missing a point.

With fixed costs of 15 k$ / title, publishers are going break even at approximately 5,400 copies sold.

You're right that the CEO of Pubzzila inc., Mr. Moloch Baal Ahab, couldn't care less - if a book doesn't have the potential to reach into the millions, Mr. M.B.A. doesn't want to publish it.

But 15k$ (or even 25k$, with 10k$ going for publicity) isn't such a huge investment. You or I couldn't afford it, but there are plenty of angel investors who could. Pretty soon there will be new publishers coming up to fill the niche that Pubzzila abandons.

[masgramondou]

Hold that thought Ori ...

[davefreer]

Ori - those figures as I clearly stated are hypothetical. But actually Mr MBA does want to publish it - or another book in its slot. That book will get zero investment in publicity, but will use capacity and pay a full share of the fixed cost the bills

[qbzzt]

With paper books distribution slots are valuable assets. If Baen did not consistently provide six books / month to Simon & Schuster, I expect the slot will go somewhere else and when Baen had a six book month they wouldn't be able to distribute more than five.

But with eBooks there are no bookshelf space assets that need to be preserved. The MBA could probably achieve better ROI by downsizing excess fixed capacity and outsourcing everything that can outsourced (editing, etc).