More Thoughts on Amazon, and Fear, and Desirable States of the Publishing Industry

I've been continuing to noodle everything that's going on between Amazon and Hachette these days, and last night as I was falling asleep, I had a very interesting thought:

I've spent plenty of time wondering what would happen if Amazon "beat" all the major publishers and attained Crushing Market Power (THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!). But I have spent very little time considering what would happen if the reverse were true. So I thought about that, and, in short, it would be bad.

I talk a lot about how publishers are shooting themselves in the foot by not selling directly to consumers more actively, meaning readers have to turn elsewhere (usually Amazon) for e-books. Well, some of them are changing gears. And if they do it well enough (which I suspect is unlikely), they could conceivably drive readers away from Amazon. This would be a terrible thing for authors, and, I suspect, for readers as well.

Amazon, for all its evils, has vastly expanded the options an author has for building their career. Ditto for selling backlist titles. Amazon has also created markets for very cheap books that did not exist before, which is good for readers. Frankly, if I have $.99 to spend on a book, I'd much rather grab a new, cheap e-book than a paperback copy that's falling apart out of a bargain bin somewhere.

In world without Amazon, or where Amazon sold as few e-books as B&N and Apple do, it would be much harder to start a career as an independent author (which, for the record, is how I think most authors should start their careers). That would be at least as bad as a world without traditional publishing, in which Amazon had no reason not to dictate draconian terms to independent authors.

Which leads me to my newest thought on where the publishing industry is: right where it should be.

If Hachette and Amazon are battling each other tooth and nail over publishing terms, that's a good thing, unless you happen to be a Hachette author. But most authors aren't Hachette authors, and eventually Hachette will make peace with the beast, and those authors' lives will go back to normal. It will then be someone else's turn.

It would be best if Amazon and large publishers made war on each other without putting their business disputes between authors and readers. But in the end, I think, I'm glad that they're warring with each other at all.

The Amazon Problem

(Note: This is replacing Friday's blog post, because I'm going to be on the road)

For those who don't know: Amazon, who has made self-publishing what it is (i.e. a path to a living for some and to readers for all) today, is brawling brutally with Hachette, one of the largest traditional publishers, over the terms of their distribution relationship. You can read up on it here and here, but the gist is that Amazon is basically doing everything short of not selling Hachette books at all in order to get them to capitulate to whatever new terms it wants for selling their books.

Charlie Stross has hit the nail on the head in describing what this means for authors. In short, it is bad, bad news. Most salient passage (emphasis mine):

By driving down the unit revenue, Amazon makes it really hard for publishers—who are a proxy for authors—to turn a profit. Eventually they go out of business, leaving just Amazon as a monopoly distribution channel retailing the output of an atomized cloud of highly vulnerable self-employed piece-workers like myself. At which point the screws can be tightened indefinitely. And after a while, there will be no more Charlie Stross novels because I will be unable to earn a living and will have to go find a paying job.

This is the nightmare scenario. It's one I have been worried about since Amazon started doing this to publishers years ago. There is nothing---absolutely nothing---underlying the amazing royalty rates that Amazon pays authors like me other than either a.) Amazon's goodwill or b.) this business strategy or one much like it. And Amazon is not a company that has gotten where it is today because of its goodwill toward suppliers.

For traditional authors, the hope is that their publishers will band together (probably through mergers, because they were sued successfully by the Department of Justice, largely at Amazon's behest, for banding together without merging---admittedly illegally, from my point of view) and survive strong enough to remain a counterweight to Amazon.

For indie authors, the hope is that Nook Press and Kobo (and to a lesser extent Apple, but they're much less friendly to indies than the other two) will remain just enough of a threat to Amazon in the realm of e-books to keep Amazon from turning the screws on self-published authors.

I went into self-publishing knowing this.

But this month I removed my titles from Nook Press and Kobo anyway.

Why?

Because I'd sold a handful of copies of Soulwoven in each venue, lifetime, and zero of Three Dances. Because Amazon gives me valuable promotional tools in return for exclusivity, and Kobo and Nook Press don't give me any promotional tools at all. Because the increasingly powerful handlers of the best marketing tools available to indies care more than anything about how many star reviews a book has on Amazon.

After writing a good book in the first place, reaching readers is the great issue in self-publishing, and by taking and holding the lead on ways to promote books, Amazon is making itself indispensable to indie authors. By requiring exclusivity to use its best promotional tools, it's also making publishing e-books anywhere else a losing proposition.

At this point. It could get better. Kobo and Nook Press do a lot of things right. Maybe someday Apple will decide it wants to be a player in the e-book market rather than try to leverage its small market share to sell hardware to self-publishers. Google may get their act together too.

It could also get worse. Amazon could start dropping royalties anytime, and I'm willing to bet Kobo and Nook Press would follow suit. Nook Press's royalties are already worse than Amazon's, and both of those companies need all the revenue they can get.

Everybody in traditional publishing fears Amazon, for two reasons. The first is that they're brutal. The second is that they're so damn good. They're light-years ahead of everyone else, and they're experimenting and rolling out new ways to connect authors and readers so fast that the best the industry can do is laugh at Amazon's failures to hide its tears over Amazon's successes, and rage when it gets the opportunity to.

Indie authors should fear Amazon too. Yes, it's the hand that feeds us, but the open palm has turned into a fist at some point for everyone who's ever been in our shoes before, and we are fools if we refuse to recognize that.

I titled this post The Amazon Problem, but Amazon is not THE problem. It is A problem. THE problem is that nobody is competing with them effectively.

P.S. Filed under "Decisions I may come to regret" because of hands that feed, and biting, and concern thereof.

Two Newsletters for the Price of One, Because I Am Forgetful

Weeeell, I forgot to put last week's newsletter up on the blog at all. Oops! News for the weeks of 1.24 and 1.30.13 to follow.

Please forgive. :-)

News for the Week of 1.24.13: Nadya, Three Dances, Webhouse, and Twitter

Greetings friends and readers!

So many exciting things to talk about I wonder if I can possibly keep this short. But here goes!

First off: Nadya is about to head off to my early readers! I’ve also got a hand-drawn cover mockup ready for Wattpad, so as soon as I get enough positive feedback to be reasonably certain I’m not going to change the first chapter drastically, it’ll be up for you to read. I’m all abuzz, because I think you’re going to love it.

Second: Three Dances is moving along splendidly! I’ve got all the artwork finished, and I’ve been working on page design for the e-book version. It’s. Going. To. Be. AWESOME! I can’t believe how well some of my experiments are turning out. It’s nothing like Soulwoven or Nadya---it’s a weirder, harder book for an older audience---but I’m incredibly proud of it, and I can’t wait for it to go out into the world. I’ve targeted March 1 for a release date (admittedly, it’s an aggressive target, and one I may miss), which means I may start putting stories from it up on Wattpad as soon as next week!

Thirdly: I’m having great fun as an editor these days. Last week I did a Twitter chat with some of the people I work with at Carina Press, and it was an absolute blast. We’re doing another one at the end of the month (1/31) from 2pm to 3pm EST using the hashtag #carinachat. If you’re on Twitter, come by and ask us questions! It’s a great way to get answers about publishing straight from the horses’ mouths.

Fourthly: My website is ready! After months of cobbling and tinkering with it in my spare time, I’m finally confident that it’s not going to spring a leak and sink into the Internet’s harbor, so it’s time to launch it. You can check it out at www.jeff-seymour.com.

And oh yeah! Soulwoven continues to roll along and pick up new reads, votes, and fans. We’re up to nearly 140,000 reads already. I promise the Aleani language primer soon. And when it hits 200,000, I’ll post one for the Sh’ma.

Thanks for reading, loving, and believing.

-Jeff

New for the Week of 1.30.13: Quiescence, Nadya is Scary, and More Twitter

Greetings Friends and Readers!

It’s been a fairly quiet week. Mostly I’ve been fielding feedback on Nadya as it comes in (so far it’s 4/4 on being reported unputdownable), tweaking things on it, and fiddling with some short stories. I’d like to put the first chapter up for you soon.

In fact, I think I’ll do it tonight, as soon as I’m done writing this newsletter. The only reason I haven’t quite yet is that, frankly, I’ve heard such good things about it so far that I’ve become afraid of it. And that’s not a good reason to do or not to do anything, really.

Soulwoven is still quietly doing its thing. Interestingly, it’s been picking up fewer reads this week but more votes and comments than usual. I’m not sure what to make of that. A few weeks back there was a giant one-day spike in reads that I’m more inclined to attribute to some sort of reckoning in Wattpad’s system than anything else. So I’m wondering if it Wattpad might be on the blink again somehow. Bonus content still on the way. Sequel still on my to-revise list.

I whiffed on my call with my copy editor and now have to try to get ahold of her again before I can move forward on Three Dances, so that’s on hold for the moment as well, to my great frustration.

All in all a quiet week, I suppose. I’m not sure how it’s gotten to be Wednesday night already.

One final thing: tomorrow I’ll be doing an editor chat with the Carina Press on Twitter again. The topic is submissions, and we’ll be taking questions on the hashtag #CarinaChat from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. EST. The last one we did was a lot of fun, so if you’re a Twitterer and you have any questions about the submitting to a publisher, come on over and ask away!

Thanks as always for all your support. I hope you enjoy Nadya, and I look forward very much to hearing what you think of her. :-)

-Jeff

The Grand Experiment

For several months now, I've been pondering whether to start serializing Soulwoven on Wattpad (for those who don't know, it's a free online writing community in which you can post and share novels or parts thereof). I created a profile. I puttered around, read a few stories, got a feel for the site. I checked out the legalese and was satisfied that yes, I would retain all rights to any work I put up there. I decided that I rather liked the community and might want to be a part of it.

But I wanted to wait and talk with a few other industry people about it before I took the plunge, just in case there were reservations I ought to have that I didn't.

This weekend, I had the opportunity to ask two agents and three authors about Wattpad at Litfest 2012.

The collective response?

"What's that?"

Somehow, despite significant coverage of the possibilities of the site in trade publications, it seems to be flying below the radar. So in the interest of bettering the general understanding of the trade, and because I am very curious about the subject myself, I am going to undertake a grand experiment.

I am going to post Soulwoven, chapter by chapter, on Wattpad, Authonomy, and Book Country (Authonomy and Book Country are similar efforts run by Harper Collins and Penguin, respectively, while Wattpad is independent as far as I can tell). And I am going to blog about my experience on each site week by week. I may pull the book from one or more at any time. At the outset, I am less than enthusiastic about Book Country in particular (it smacks of vanity publishing), and I have my doubts about Authonomy as well (while I approve of crowdsourcing the submissions process in general, it doesn't exactly turn me on as an author).

I think it's going to be quite fun.

And as a slight bonus, it means that those of you who have expressed repeated interest in reading Soulwoven will be able to start it shortly.

Hugo Nominees

Discovered here that a list of nominees for the Hugo Award went up last week. For those of you who don't know what they are, here's the introduction from their website:

The Hugo Awards, presented annually since 1955, are science fiction’s most prestigious award. The Hugo Awards are voted on by members of the World Science Fiction Convention (“Worldcon”), which is also responsible for administering them.

In the world of Sci-Fi and Fantasy, they are actually every bit the big deal that their website claims them to be. Usually I flip through the nominations without thinking too hard, but this year two things jumped out at me:

1.) I am clearly not the only one who thinks that Doctor Who is by far the best SF/F (and probably the best overall) show on TV.

2.) “Shadow War of the Night Dragons: Book One: The Dead City: Prologue” by John Scalzi (Tor.com) was nominated for best short story. I know it's not particularly PC for an author or editor to criticize an award nomination, but this story was an April fool's joke. I got the joke. I laughed. I was glad someone had written it. I stopped reading after about the first page and moved on.

There's an awful lot of SF/F out there that's trying to do more important things than satirize bad SF/F, and it needs all the publicity it can get. It makes me sad that the voters behind one of the biggest venues for recognizing SF/F short fiction chose to nominate a satire on their genre rather than something new and exciting in it.