Let’s Lower Our Voices
This is a column I originally published in June 2012. Again, I have little recollection of writing most of this. I do recall making the reference to Bezos and his “trip to the moon” near the end.
Last year at this time [June 2011 — happy days! 🙂 ], I wrote a column about the nature of success and how nothing is assured in this world. This year, I’d like to emphasize that I’m taking none of the success I’m enjoying for granted. Regardless of your calling in life, there are no guarantees of succeeding. Furthermore, success includes more than just making money, in my opinion.
Since then, many things have changed. For one, Amazon isn’t the only company offering ereader devices. Furthermore, publishers and traditional publishing, in general, are finally realizing that indie authors aren’t a bunch of hippies who just want to write crap and sell it. I’m a lawyer and a business woman, as well as a fiction author. I didn’t come to drink Kool-Aid.
In addition, the publishing business isn’t based on a rational model. It never has been. However, that lack of rationality has become even more painfully obvious since the advent of the Kindle.
Unfortunately, it seems the publishing industry is even more hidebound than the legal profession, because despite the clear evidence that indie publishing for Kindle was a threat to its own existence, the publishing industry continued to accept Amazon as its retailer of choice. Not only that, but it continued to use Amazon’s sales ranking system to judge its own product’s success.
As a result, the publishing business scoffed when indie authors published their work on Kindle, then saw them succeed. This meant they lost potential mid-list authors they could have signed, until authors like Amanda Hocking, John Locke, Karen McQuestion and many other indie authors hit it big with huge sales made through Kindle publishing. Then, mid-list authors realized indies weren’t just a bunch of Kool-Aid drinking hippies. They started self-publishing books for Kindle, too. Publishers lost even more of their mid-list authors, who never got any marketing or promotional support from their publishers, anyway. This further fueled the fires of author antipathy against an industry based on a lousy business model, but too full of itself to see the error of its ways. Until the alarm bells sounded.
Eager to catch up, bookstores realized they needed to provide their own ereader devices if they had any hope of surviving against the mammoth force of Amazon and the Kindle. However, they had the overhead costs of brick-and-mortar stores to cover, along with the need to catch up with a huge tech company that had gotten a more than significant head start by catching the indie author wave first, along with disgruntled mid-list authors who’d seen the light and gone rogue by also embracing the all-mighty Kindle.
Bookstores aren’t tech companies. Neither are publishers. Undone by their own hubris, both businesses floundered under the weight of years of bad business decisions, while indie authors cheered on.
Meanwhile, the ebook market became really crowded. This led to greater competition, which I sense has caused a rising panic to set in. I hear it in the occasional question from other authors. How are you promoting your book? What’s working for you? Bottom line: how will I survive?
On Twitter, I see authors constantly tweeting book giveaways. Or promos and reviews. “Look at me! Look at me!” “Buy my book! Buy my book!” “Take my book! Take my book! Please!”
And, the irony is that they’re not doing it for the readers. They’re doing it for themselves, because Amazon’s paying them to list books exclusively with them for 90 days. Some authors have given other retailers the heave-ho entirely. I guess they figure they’ll provide their Nook readers with books sometime after they throw in the towel and buy a Kindle.
Finally, I won’t presume to be able to read minds, but I practiced law long enough to recognize angry rhetoric. There seems to be far too much of it, along with a lot of confusion about the DOJ litigation. This is a situation in which emotions run so high, many authors aren’t capable of separating their emotions from the long-term business and legal aspects of the case. Frankly, the parties should have tried to fix their broken business model, rather than seek stop-gap solutions that invited an anti-trust suit. The Justice Department in its zeal to thwart an alleged cartel of publishers from horizontal price-setting is, for all intents and purposes, opening the door for Amazon to monopolize the publishing and bookselling market, at the very least.
Amazon enjoys this great advantage, not only due to its being an innovator by creating the Kindle, but also by being a mammoth technology company and retailer that sells a wide variety of goods (from electronics to books to DVDs to clothes, etc.), as well as not having brick-and-mortar retail showrooms, with the overhead cost that entails. And publishers have been partners with bookstores forever, allowing them 100% refunds on all unsold books returned to them. A business model made in hell.
However, no worries. Amazon will take care of all of our needs, after it becomes the only publisher, retailer and content provider of any sort. Besides, someone has to pay for Jeff Bezos’ possible trip to the moon, right?
PS: This month, I’m happy to report (by some miracle) my fiction writing business is still operating in the black, after all expenses (including conference costs) are taken into account. Now, how many indie authors who aren’t in Amazon’s KDP Select program can make that claim?
PPS: The print version of RIPTIDE will be released this month. Really!
Blogger’s Update: The print version of FATAL CONNECTIONS will be released next month. Really! 🙂
And these days it would take a minor miracle for me to make anywhere near what I did ten years ago from Amazon book sales.
“Amazon just wants content. They don’t care about great content,” one industry veteran tells TheWrap.
Oh, and BTW, Amazon is a web services company. That’s how they make money. And Jeff Bezos owns the Web in more ways than you think.
That plus an insurrection and a pandemic and … well … 🙂
Originally published at http://randomandsundrythings.wordpress.com on April 29, 2022.
