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?

Read and learn more

Related article on Amazon Publishing Imprints

Writers Welcome Blog is available on Kindle :)

Amazon and the Underbelly of the Internet Economy

Amazon had a BIG drop in third quarter operating income ... To be exact, a whopping 71% drop over the same time last year!

The drop is mainly due to such business practices as expansion  and new products (Kindle Fire) designed to sell for a loss in order to boost sales of other tangental Amazon products such as e-books, videos and music.

When all the economists and business analysts delved into the reasoning for the Amazon third quarter decline they also found that the Amazon Behemoth had a dark side ... or underbelly if you will.

Ahhh yes, when sales are high the Greed Monster takes over and it pushes and pushes workers and equipment harder and harder until something, or someone, breaks!

What a horrible, stifling, stressful merry-go-round to be caught up in.

Here's more by David Streitfeld in the New York Times:

Amazon Suffers Big Drop in Income

Investors shrugged off Amazon’s warnings this summer that its third quarter would be weak.

Whoops.

Moments after the retailer reported Tuesday that operating income for the quarter had fallen 71 percent from 2010, the high-flying stock sank $25 in after-hours trading. Add the $10 that Amazon had lost before the earnings report, and its market cap shriveled in one day by about $16 billion.

If the past was weak, Amazon was cautious about the future, too. Despite the new Kindle Fire tablet’s selling so well that it was already increasing production, Amazon said it might lose as much as $200 million in the fourth quarter.

“There are times when investors shoot first and ask questions later,” said Scott Devitt, an analyst with Morgan Stanley. He remains a believer. “Does the company still have a strong ability to grow? I think the answer is yes.”

Revenue for the third quarter, which ended Sept. 30, came in largely on target. As customers swarmed to boxes of dried cherries, “Pirates of the Caribbean,” downloads of the Sims video games, diagnostic code readers for cars and the latest “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” — all Amazon best sellers in their categories — sales rose 44 percent to $10.88 billion.

Amazon has been stressing recently, as it has so often over its 16-year history, that it is investing for the future, not seeking immediate profit. With revenue rising about 40 percent each quarter, it simply needs more capacity. In a highly competitive and fragile retailing environment, that is an enviable problem to have.

Read and learn more

Get Writers Welcome Blog on Kindle! :)))

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.”

Read and learn more 

Get Writers Welcome Blog right on your Kindle :)))