Amazon Bypassing Publishers By Signing Authors Directly 461
Hugh Pickens writes "David Streitfeld reports that Amazon is aggressively wooing top authors, gnawing away at the services publishers, critics and agents used to provide. 'Everyone's afraid of Amazon,' says Richard Curtis, a longtime agent who is also an e-book publisher. 'The only really necessary people in the publishing process now are the writer and reader,' adds Russell Grandinetti, one of Amazon's top executives. 'Everyone who stands between those two has both risk and opportunity.' But publishers are fighting back at writers who publish with Amazon. In 2010 Kiana Davenport signed with a division of Penguin for The Chinese Soldier's Daughter, a Civil War love story, and received a $20,000 advance. In the meantime Davenport packaged several award-winning short stories she had written 20 years ago and packaged them in an e-book, Cannibal Nights, available on Amazon. When Penguin found out, it went 'ballistic,' accusing her of breaking her contractual promise to avoid competition, canceling her novel, and suing Davenport to recover her advance. Davenport knows her crime: 'Sleeping with the enemy? Perhaps. But now I know who the enemy is.'"
Publisher Pricing (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe they got tired of having to qualify every eBook price with "This price was set by the publisher".
Want to know what's wrong with the eBook market? Just check out this [amazon.com] page; $15 for a poorly scanned version of a book that was written more than 40 years ago, that's available new in paperback and even hardcover for less. Seriously? Who the hell comes up with these pricing models? Even as a huge eBook fan there's been plenty of books that I've passed on because I just can't justify the cost for a digital copy, even ignoring the fact that the digital copy is DRM'd to Amazon's tool set.
Re:Amazon is just another publisher. (Score:4, Insightful)
Assuming so is treading in dangerous waters.
There is room for both. (Score:5, Insightful)
What I hope to see from this is two competing markets. Hopefully this will coax the publishing industry to give authors a better cut. Maybe that's a bit too pie-in-the-sky, but it's possible. Let's hope the publishing industry can adapt better than the goddamned RIAA.
Good! (Score:5, Insightful)
The more of these middle man made-up positions we can remove, the better.
Next up: record executives, realtors, and oil prospectors.
Re:Amazon is just another publisher. (Score:1, Insightful)
Have you read the contract she signed? Thought not.
You are assuming things as well.
Re:Amazon is just another publisher. (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course. If the whole chain is in-house they'll be able to eliminate a lot of unnecessary overhead, making it more efficient and profitable than having to deal with external business partners stuck in the 19th century.
Re:There is room for both. (Score:5, Insightful)
I think some people are too quick to write off the publishing industry. They still provide things you won't find on Amazon, such as EDITORS.
Editors are important, but you don't need to sign with a publishing house to get your book edited. There's nothing stopping you from hiring a freelance editor and publishing on Amazon if you think it's necessary.
In the end, I think the market will make the decision here. If publishers add value, then readers will stick with traditional publishers. If they don't, then Amazon will win.
Re:Amazon is just another publisher. (Score:5, Insightful)
The author says she didn't violate the contract. The publisher's actions imply that they think she did. From the author's description, it sounds like a "no compete" clause, not an "exclusivity" one. The author says one of the e-published works was actually published prior to their contract. The e-published works were short story collections, which according to the author, contained subject matter different than the contracted novel.
She says that the works were previously rejected by the "big six" publishers, which includes Penguin. From that, it seems to me that Penguin, by their prior rejection of the work, had already determined that it wasn't competitive.
Re:Amazon is just another publisher. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:There is room for both. (Score:5, Insightful)
Lack of money is. Ultimately a publisher these days is simply a one stop shop offering a loan, editing, typesetting, cover art, promotion, distribution and a selection of other tasks that are needed to make a book successful.
You could get all that yourself from other sources but I suspect few lenders would lend you money on the same terms - no requirement to pay it all back until your writing careers is a success.
They take profit from successful books (Score:5, Insightful)
Publishers take a lot of the profit from successful books. They also end up paying a lot of advances on complete duds on which they lost money. (Same thing with music labels.) Vanity publishing has always been available to authors that think they can make more money by cutting out the middleman. (If you could convince a bookstore to carry the things... most booksellers have better things to do than wade through self-published crap.)
I agree that the traditional publishing model is now becoming outdated with the advent of e-books, but it had it's purpose at the time.
Re:One company (Score:4, Insightful)
But there's an implied hidden "cost" in Amazon's business practices. It's easy to say you offer the lowest prices when you've put everyone else out of business, including the shoddy big-chain bookstores that put the quality local bookstores out of business. Lack of competition in markets is bad, even when it seems to mean the customer saves a buck.
Re:One company (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean the "shoddy" Barnes and Noble that had 100,000 books as compared to the "quality" local bookstore that had 10,000? Or was it that the "shoddy" Barnes & Noble could get me the book they didn't have in two days, but it took the "quality" local bookstore two weeks? Or was it that the "shoddy" Barnes and Noble sold Christian bestsellers at 10-20% below cover price, while the "quality" local Christian bookstore marked them up above cover price? Or the "shoddy" B&N database that let them find just about any book, however obscure, foreign or domestic, and how long it would take them to get it, but the "quality" local bookstore that often just couldn't or wouldn't get the book I wanted?
Thanks for clarifying.
There were and are many good reasons for supporting your local booksellers. But, generally, superior quality isn't one of them.
Re:Amazon is just another publisher. (Score:5, Insightful)
For you not to directly compete with your own products seems like a reasonable expectation, provided the terms are laid out clearly.
If you think any of the terms of a typical publisher contract are laid out clearly, you have completely missed the point. My book went into print a year ago, and it seems every month I find a new way I'm being screwed I didn't see coming. The latest wrinkle involves how I don't get any per-copy royalties for the foreign translations (of which there currently are one). This means I'm now competing against the foreign copies of my own book! It's in there, now that I go back and re-read the dense fine print in that one section, but "laid out clearly" is certainly is not. Like a lot of contract exchanges, the publishing company has enormously more legal resources to craft a contract that benefits them, compared to any one author. This is why the contracts all favor the publisher, and authors normally feel abused--unless you're a famous enough author to have your own agent and legal team.
The idea that the advance on a book represents some giant sum the publisher should get all sorts of benefits from is exactly the line of thinking that needs to be stopped here. Publishers used to lay out that money and a large second sum for printing of books, which may or may not get sold. They were assuming a lot of risk, and traditional publication contracts reflect that. But it's not true any more, as printing moves to on-demand or not at all, in the e-book case. Much like the big music industry, publishers haven't quite figured out yet they can easily end up being only minimally useful middle-men to experienced content creators. And like a lot of negotiation the easiest way to get better terms is to just walk away altogether. The big decision on my next book isn't "which publisher", it's "do I need a regular publisher at all?". Right now, one of the biggest problems I have is that my publisher screwed up the Kindle version of my book; they just didn't do the QA to make it readable. I'm pretty sure Amazon has that down had they done it themselves.
Re:One company (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:One company (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly. I can think of quite a few businesses that a similar analogy can be applied to:
Here in the UK a lot of neighbourhood pubs have gone. And there's this fantasy going around that the pubs that have gone were all selling a wide range of high-quality beer and good food at a reasonable price; when they closed down it came as a great surprise.
But that's all it is. A fantasy. Without even thinking I can name several pubs that haven't been decorated in years, have walls that are still heavily nicotine stained despite the fact that smoking was banned in public places in 2007; carpet that's threadbare in places and sticky in others. The toilets are a health hazard, they don't do food (or if they do it tastes like they cooked it in the toilet), they've got a lousy range of beer, an equally lousy choice of cider (considering this is Somerset this is practically a criminal offence!), they don't feel particularly welcoming when you go in and they charge prices more commensurate with a fancy city-centre bar.
Specifically, a fancy city-centre bar that serves good food, has clean toilets, a floor you don't stick to and walls that if they're a yellow-brown colour, are obviously intended to be.
These are the pubs that are going out of business. The world has changed and they haven't.