More on Amazon Publishing - The Devil is in the Still Morphing Details

Everything experiences growing pains. Amazon's foray into the publishing world is no exception.

No denying Amazon, coupled with the fast-evolving digital tech, is and will be a real game changer ... But, the pros and cons details are still shaking out.

For more background on Amazon Publishing please refer to these three previous posts.

This from David Streitfeld in the New York Times:

Uncovering Amazon Publishing

The legacy book publishers are pretty much open shops. If you want to know how many titles they are publishing this fall, just get a catalog and add them up. Amazon is taking a different tack, shrouding much of the plans for its publishing venture in the secrecy it extends to most of its business dealings. (Apple, no slouch at being close-mouthed, at least reveals how many iPads it sells. Amazon does not do the same with Kindles.)


Amazon issues a press release when announcing a new imprint — a half-dozen so far, plus a somewhat anomalous operation run by the entrepreneurial thinker Seth Godin — but little more. Since the books are sold almost exclusively on the Amazon site and are usually digital, they do not appear on any of the traditional best-seller lists. What is selling is unclear; how and why is even murkier.


Laura Hazard Owen at Paidcontent.org took a dive this week into the subject with her article “The Truth About Amazon Publishing.” After counting the books one by one, she found 263 current and forthcoming Amazon titles. Just about all are also published in physical form. Readers are enthusiastic about reviewing these efforts and tend to give them high grades (average: 4.09 out of 5).

About a fifth of the titles become digital best sellers, too. But this tended to happen when the titles were sold at promotional prices, which illustrates the power of becoming the Kindle Daily Deal but little else. “Elizabeth Street” by Laurie Fabiano, described as “a novel based on true events” of the Italian immigrant experience, was featured in a late August deal, after which it hit No. 1. It is now 1,542.

Ms. Owen concludes that “Amazon Publishing hasn’t killed print yet.” But is anyone saying it has? The real question is whether it will reshape publishing by dissolving old rules and creating new expectations, the way it has reconfigured bookselling. Will a physical edition become the reward for a successful electronic publication? Will authors enlarge their share of e-book revenues at the expense of traditional publishers? Will independent bookstores carry Amazon books? How will readers on Amazon itself discover these new titles? What sort of cottage industries will grow up to help writers promote their books online?

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Related article on Amazon Publishing Imprints

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The Publishing Genie Is Out Of The Bottle ...

... And it appears that even established authors are having trouble thinking outside the box. Some renowned authors are so used to a certain structure (a rather restricted and stingy one at that) they can think only in terms of the old publishing model and can't visualize the possibilities in modern publishing. Can't handle the new freedom in the publishing landscape.

It's sort of like when a dictator-driven country is suddenly liberated and the citizens just don't know what to do or where to turn ... at least at first.

Warren Adler, author of The War of the Roses, Random Hearts and the PBS trilogy The Sunset Gang, is also a pioneer in digital publishing. But, even with his digital experience, his musings in the following article show his latent bewilderment and uneasiness with the current publishing landscape ... and just how new authors will be discovered.

At least that's my take on it.

Simply, authors today will have to do the exact same thing they did under the traditional publishing model, except they will have to do it more vertically ... Put another way, they are now empowered to do many of the tasks that had to be done for them before ... at great monetary and time expense.

Here then is the renowned Warren Adler with some great insight on the new Amazon publishing imprint and other musings:

The Publishing Civil War

So, Amazon is to become the official publisher of its own books. It was, of course, bound to happen, too tempting to resist. After all, it does represent a large chunk of the retail book business and does operate its own production and distribution facilities both through its Kindle and print sites.

In effect, it now competes not only with its suppliers (meaning other publishers) large and small, but also with other authors, both traditionally published and a giant wave of self-published authors.

As a pioneer in the eBook juggernaut when it was a pipsqueak possible spinoff of publishing in the early days of Internet sales, I viewed this development as an inevitability. It is by no means a surprise.

The upcoming phase in what is clearly a civil war between the traditional publishers and a powerful arm of its distribution system is what will happen next. The fact is that Amazon has been skirting around the edges for years, and in some ways has been its own publisher, offering titles exclusive to its sites.

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Writing 'Big House' Publishers Out of the Loop

“Publishers are terrified and don’t know what to do”

Amazon is on the move again! Agressively signing up authors in direct contracts that cut out the traditional publishers, agents and critics.

This from The New York Times by DAVID STREITFELD :

Amazon.com has taught readers that they do not need bookstores. Now it is encouraging writers to cast aside their publishers.

Amazon will publish 122 books this fall in an array of genres, in both physical and e-book form. It is a striking acceleration of the retailer’s fledging publishing program that will place Amazon squarely in competition with the New York houses that are also its most prominent suppliers.


It has set up a flagship line run by a publishing veteran, Laurence Kirshbaum, to bring out brand-name fiction and nonfiction. It signed its first deal with the self-help author Tim Ferriss. Last week it announced a memoir by the actress and director Penny Marshall, for which it paid $800,000, a person with direct knowledge of the deal said.

Publishers say Amazon is aggressively wooing some of their top authors. And the company is gnawing away at the services that publishers, critics and agents used to provide.

Several large publishers declined to speak on the record about Amazon’s efforts. “Publishers are terrified and don’t know what to do,” said Dennis Loy Johnson of Melville House, who is known for speaking his mind.

“Everyone’s afraid of Amazon,” said Richard Curtis, a longtime agent who is also an e-book publisher. “If you’re a bookstore, Amazon has been in competition with you for some time. If you’re a publisher, one day you wake up and Amazon is competing with you too. And if you’re an agent, Amazon may be stealing your lunch because it is offering authors the opportunity to publish directly and cut you out.

“It’s an old strategy: divide and conquer,” Mr. Curtis said.

Amazon executives, interviewed at the company’s headquarters here, declined to say how many editors the company employed, or how many books it had under contract. But they played down Amazon’s power and said publishers were in love with their own demise.

“It’s always the end of the world,” said Russell Grandinetti, one of Amazon’s top executives. “You could set your watch on it arriving.”

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Is Amazon a Danger Lurking in the Publishing Industry?

Is Amazon getting too big for its britches? Creating and positioning itself on a monopolistic throne where it can wield too much dictatorial power?

Victoria Barnsley, UK CEO of HarperCollins, thinks Amazon's presence and goals in publishing today are a big concern and says so in an article by Graeme Neill on TheBookseller.com:

Amazon publishing a "concern"—Barnsley

Amazon's move into publishing is a "concern" and the business is close to being in a monopolistic position, according to the c.e.o. of HarperCollins.

Victoria Barnsley was the latest book trade figure to appear on BBC Radio 4's "The Future of the Book" segment on "The World at One", broadcast today (16th August).

In a wide-ranging interview, she said she felt hardback prices would increase as they

increased in quality; digital fiction sales would be 50% of the category's total within two years; touched upon the News International phone-hacking row; and said the agent Andrew Wylie has apologised to her following a recent row where he accused the publisher of acting in a "shrill and punitive way" towards authors.

Barnsley described Amazon as a "very very powerful global competitor" of HarperCollins. She said: "I think Amazon's foray into book publishing . . . is obviously a concern . . . They are this weird thing. We can them 'frenemies'. They are also a very important customer of ours and they have done fantastic things for the book industry. I have mixed views about them but there's no doubt they are very very powerful now and in fact they are getting close to being in a monopolistic situation."

She described agents' attempts to secure greater digital royalties for their authors as a "bone of contention" between both parties. She said: "We would argue that we actually invest a huge amount in authors, invest a huge amount in marketing and reach. It is a bone of contention. I don't think we should be [in dispute] because what we add is of enormous value, which, say, the digital technology companies don't give."

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Related article: Amazon as publisher: What does it mean?



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