Amazon Isn't Killing Writing, the Market Is 192
An anonymous reader writes: Amazon has been struggling for price control of the book and ebook markets for years, battling publicly and privately with publishers while making a lot of authors nervous. With yesterday's announcement of "Kindle Unlimited," a Netflix-like ebook subscription service, Amazon is reaching their endgame in disrupting the book-selling business. But there are other companies doing the same thing, and an article at TechCrunch makes the case that it's the general market, rather than any company in particular, that's making it harder for authors to earn a living. "Driving the prices lower isn't likely to expand the market of readers, since book prices don't seem to be the deciding factor on whether someone reads a book (time is). But those lower prices directly shrink the incomes of authors, who lack any other means of translating their sales into additional revenue. That's why I don't think the big revolution for writers and other content producers will come from Amazon, but rather from startups like Patreon, which allow producers to build audiences directly and develop their own direct subscription model with their most fervent fans."
"the market" = biz managers (Score:5, Insightful)
the whole "print is dead" meme is a myth
people want relevant, accurate news more than ever
people want entertainment that is not formulaic & trite more than ever
the ***ONY*** reasons authors, musicians, journalists and other "content creators" are suffering is because of:
***bad business management of the companies they work for***
these unscrupulous business managers are trained to understand "business" and "profit" as ONLY SHORT TERM METRICS that are abstracted into more "numbers" that they have to "hit"
it's based on the **incorrect** concept that people don't care if their journalism, art, music is quality or not...they cynically assume that people will watch whatever is on TV, read whatver books are put in front of them, and listen to trite, predictable music indefinitely
ITS NOT TRUE
people want variety, they notice repetition...
the only reason is that we, as consumers, have been conditioned by bullshit marketing to have ***REDUCED EXPECTATIONS OF VALUE***
this is a hoodwink, plain and simple
More the economics of publishing (Score:5, Insightful)
There is literally too much content and most of it looks awful.
I took a look Amazon's kindle unlimited this afternoon and what I saw were an incredible number of science fiction authors that I never heard of, pushing out what the blurbs and titles made look like bad romance novels in space.
The functions of the editor and publisher are just missing from this mish mash. If you look at paper publishing it's a large financial commitment to publish and market any given book and most would never pay back the investment. Hence publishers to market the works and editors to select quality material were immensely valuable and helped make certain that if an authors work was published it had a better than random submission chance of earning back it's costs.
Now the cost to "Publsish" as an e-book is minimal and much of what would never have been published in the past is flooding all over the place. So you have lots of "Authors" self publishing and not making money. This really shouldn't come as a shocker. The problem is there are so many of them they overwhelm everything else. If I read correctly Kindle Unlimited has 600,000 titles. It's just numbers but there really just aren't enough people in the world to see that most of those authors make a living from being published there.
Re:Yep, how the music industry was killed... (Score:5, Insightful)
And even those are not earning much money.
In a interview a few years ago with Ani DiFranco, the report was gushing on how much higher her margins, as a independent artist, than The Dave Mathew Band. Which made DiFranco laugh because The Dave Mathew Band was making so much more money. DiFranco pointed out that going independent was about freedom of control not about the money.
It is not about margins it is about market structure. Piracy has trained consumers that music should be cheap.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Return to patronage (Score:-1, Insightful)
The idea that anyone can make a living directly off of content generation is going to be a particularly quaint 20th century phenomenon as the years go by. Even without the corporate driven market disruption, content creators of the present and the future continue to face increasing competition from the heartless and cold past.
Eventually, and soon, content generation for pay is going to be something primarily sponsored by wealthy patrons, rather than the mass media buying public.
For consumers, the difficulty will be deciding which content to view, not which content they can afford.
Re:Yep, how the music industry was killed... (Score:4, Insightful)
That actually isn't what Happend at all. You need to go further back than 1998.
Not to mention that your prices are way off - someone like Madonna gets $4-5 bucks an album, and that's the super-high end.
Cheap singles are nothing new. Singles drove the industry from the 60's through the 80's. Then labels slowly stopped releasing singles, forcing folks to buy an entire album for one song. This really hit the mainstream when Britney Spears first album, "...Baby One More Time". The title song was a huge radio and MTV hit, but it was unavailable as a single, and was only available when they finally dropped the album, forcing folks to buy the whole album to get the song (with the album filled largely with filler like "Email My Heart"). This resulted in an instant #1 album.
By holding back singles, they forced folks to spend much more on albums, which became standard practice - and it's no coincidence that this coincided with the rise of Napster because it was the only way folks could just get one single song without spending $15-20. It was a direct response to taking away choice from the market place.
There is a lot more to it before and after, but that's the basic gist - how the labels basically created the whole download environment by manipulating the market just as the technology became available to circumnavigate the entire thing. Since then they have played catch up and obviously largely lost in the long run.
This is also why your average AAA-list concert act sells tickets starting at $150-300 - because the record companies don't get a cut of that, and it's where they make the bulk of their money. Not that it hasn't always really been that way, of course.
Re: "the market" = biz managers (Score:4, Insightful)
Genre Fiction in books sell 10:1 vs general fiction/literature.
Using your argument though, most popular TV shows according to that wiki list vs highest rated on IMDB - only 1 title shows up in both lists: Friends. Same for IMDB's "movie meter", same applies to the "finale" list as well.
Take the example of Firefly, amazing critical response, 9.2 imdb rating (#23 by user rating, #28 by number of votes, etc), an absolute fanatic fanbase that actually got the show to break Amazon's top 30 dvd sales list 196 weeks after release.
Average viewers? 4.7 million - 98th on the Nielsen list. Cancelled before the first season ended.
Meanwhile NCIS, one of the most predictable middle of the road bore fests gets 17 million average viewers 11 seasons, 2 spinoff series (5 seasons of NCIS:LA averaging 16.5 million viewers) all 3 are ongoing.
Mediocre crap sells because it's cheap to produce, easy to market (cause people know what they're getting), and easy to keep churning out.