Amazon Is Recruiting Authors For Its eBook Library

Nate the greatest writes "Amazon just announced a $6 million pool of money that it plans to pay authors. All you have to do to get a share of the loot is commit to sell your ebook exclusively through the Kindle Store and agree to let your ebook be lent to Kindle Prime members. Amazon has already signed up a number of authors, including 31 of the top 50 self-published ones (J. Carson Black, Gemma Halliday, J.A. Konrath, B.V. Larson, C.J. Lyons, Scott Nicholson, Julie Ortolon, Theresa Ragan, J.R. Rain, Patricia Ryan, and more). It looks like Amazon launched this to support the Kindle Owners' Lending Library that Amazon launched just over a month ago. When it launched it had around 5 thousand titles as well as some less than voluntary participants. But there's a catch. Authors are required to give Amazon an exclusive on any title in the program. That means they're giving up the rest of the ebook market. Would any authors care to weigh in on the deal?"

Horrible idea

[Augusto]

I'm sure the money is tempting but I really dislike this. I'm trying to imagine a future where publishers stop printing books, and we end up with an all eBook world that requires you to have a particular platform or device to read said books!

Do we really want to follow an "exclusive for this platform" model like consoles for books?!?!?

Re:WHY

[YrWrstNtmr]

Why do we still have book publishing?! Everything should by indie and self marketed.

For the same reason that most people don't fix their own plumbing. It is easier and safer to pay a professional to do it.

Re:Worth experImenting with

[cultiv8]

I expect that would be strong enough incentive to be willing to experiment with a book or two.

It took me 16 months to write a book on Drupal [slashdot.org], the idea of "experimenting with a book or two" doesn't sit well with me, especially if I need to commit to selling it exclusively through the Kindle store.

Re:WHY

[ShakaUVM]

"Everything should be by indie and self marketed."

You make an ironic case for why editors are needed in the process.

Also, self-marketing means that your book sales will be in the low 1-digits.

Re:Not a big incentive

[SirGarlon]

All this will do is draw unknowns/not established authors.

You say that like it's a bad thing.

Re:Horrible idea

[dotancohen]

Do we really want to follow an "exclusive for this platform" model like consoles for books?!?!?

Why not when "made for Internet Explorer" and "best viewed in Netscape" were all the rage not long ago? We are condemned to keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again (see: DRM, religion, politics).

Re:WHY

[rbowen]

Having gone both ways I think I can answer this.

1. Editing services
2. Typesetting and layout
3. Marketing

Most authors, even good ones, need these and don't do them well themselves.

Most folks can figure out the first to but it's very hard to market a book yourself, especially for a first book.

First Steps

[DonJefe68]

This is only partially about cornering the eBook market (or should I say peripherally). The Amazon Prime lending library's main drawback is the lack of established authors and more current works. I'm just betting this is a trial program to test the waters. Mr. Bezos' next step will be to extend such an offer to a big name author. Ultimately, I believe his goal is to essentially dismantle the existing infrastructure of publishers and agents, with Amazon, of course, being the corporate entity to jump in and allow authors more or less direct access to the market without those middlemen taking a cut. In the short term, I like this plan. Any time a layer of middlemen can be eliminated it is simply a matter of the market making a process more efficient, which is a good thing, both for authors (less cuts out of their royalties) and for Amazon (larger pool of renowned authors). The issue is the long term implication. If this process leads to all authors being locked into a proprietary tech, that is bad. So, in short, authors should be happy, but tread carefully and be sure to be aware of what the motives are for these moves. If handled carefully, authors can still win this battle in the long term - they have the truly irreplaceable commodity here, their words.

Re:WHY

[jbmartin6]

Heh heh I love the irony! I have to agree, I tried some of the $3 books on Amazon and probably won't try any more. The books were sorely in need of not only basic error correction but some professional editing. Contradictory plot elements, repetitive characters, and other nightmares were common. I wouldn't look forward to self-published world, unless 'edited by xxxx' became a valuable marketing tool where people shopped editors as well as authors. Meanwhile, I don't begrudge a few extra dollars for the added service of a professional editor.

Re:WHY

[captainpanic]

If you do it yourself, you also take the risk.
Publishers can pay a some money up front, and then a certain crappy percentage per book later... if it sells bad, that's a good idea for the author, and if it sells well the publishers win. If you're an author, do you want to take the risk?

In addition, the authors often wish to see their books in book stores. And guess what? The publishers have contracts with those.

The problem has become that publishers+stores+the whole industry has become quite large. They simply cost a lot more money than strictly necessary, which means that the authors get less.

It's like a giant overhead cost: the production line is the author writing the book, and the printing shop, and the product is a book. And everything else (except transportation) is overhead. If you look carefully, it is scary how much overhead our world has got. Not so strange then that we're in a crisis. (Yes, I am going off topic quickly).

Please, please, please

[jtownatpunk.net]

Please spend that money to hire editors!

I've been reading a decent amount of self-published stuff over the past year and I've come across a lot of material that would be pretty darn good if only it had been given just the most basic pass by a competent editor. Misspellings, partially revised sentences, incorrect punctuation, etc. I'm hoping that, one of these days, I find a story compelling enough that I'll offer to pay for the services of a good editor. Then I could call myself a patron of the arts.

Re:Experimental authors may like this

[sandytaru]

*Story - and there's an example of why even a good writer needs a better editor to watch their back!

Re:Horrible idea

[jtownatpunk.net]

Actually, a small number of widely-used DRM methods is exactly what is required to ensure freedom from DRM. Ten years ago, there were a ton of different content protection strategies and very little content. It wasn't worth the effort of cracking every method in use. Now we've boiled it down to two major DRM methods and both have a ton of mainstream content. It's no surprise that both methods can be thwarted with a few clicks of the mouse.

Content I bought ten years ago is long gone because authentication servers no longer exist, the computers the content was tied to are long gone, the software doesn't run in Win7, etc. But the content I buy today gets stripped of DRM and copied to my array. From there, I can convert it to any format I want and read it on any device I want. That's only possible because Amazon (azw), Sony (epub), Barnes and Noble (epub), Apple (epub), etc. have created their "exclusive platforms" while failing to understand that content can't be controlled that way.

Amazon invited me to take part in this...

[Pembers]

I'm an indie author (see sig) with a couple of books on sale at Amazon, among other places. On the one hand, Amazon already accounts for about 90% of my sales, so I wouldn't be giving up much revenue by offering a title there exclusively, and it wouldn't take much borrowing to make up the loss. On the other hand, everyone and his dog will jump on this programme, so that $6 million pie is going to be cut into a lot of very thin slices, to the point that the likely reward doesn't seem worth what I have to give up in order to participate. If someone manages to challenge Amazon as an ebook retailer, I don't want to be locked out of them. On the gripping hand, I've seen what companies do when they become monopolies, and I've no desire to help build another one.

Bricks-and-mortar libraries don't tell authors and publishers, "We'll stock your books if you promise not to sell them anywhere else." Then again, no library is anywhere near as big or influential as Amazon...