I should be getting the next galley proof today – Half Share this time. The Quarter Share files are still hung up in the proofing process. I talked about amazon and its competition — and about bookstores — today.
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Walks are good! It looks like you map might need a tweak. It’s not displaying right.
Thanks. I think theyre fixed. Apparently there was a typo yesterday that got replicated this morning.
While I agree with most of what you said on the topic I believe this is a logical fallacy to say that if a publisher wishes to compete with Amazon they need to start selling electronics and garden hoses.
To compete with Pete Sampras in a tennis match you don’t need to compete with him on how well he cooks dinner or have fast he drives on the freeway. It is entirely possible to compete with an aspect of a person or a company. Logitech and Microsoft absolutely compete in the input device market (mice, keyboards, etc.), but Logitech doesn’t sell an operating system or have a search engine.
That said, though, I agree that they are on crack if they think they are competing with Amazon on selling books. Amazon may have *enabled* lots of people to sell their work without them (publishers) getting to choose what gets published and take a big cut, but the big publishers are vompeting with Nathan Lowell, John Locke, and every one of the tens of thousands of people selling small numbers of books, not with Amazon. They blame Amazon for democratizing the marketplace (though I bet they don’t use such a positive word to describe the blood gates being opened) … so they try to fight Amazon instead of the hard problem of trying to figure out how to keep being a useful, relevant, profitable endeavor.
In a small way, they are competing with Thomas & Mercer, Amazon’s new publishing house, but I don’t think that’s what they mean when they say competing with Amazon.
My point was that Amazon does not just sell books. They sell a whole collection of goods. Books and book products only make up 30% of their revenue stream. Saying that a publisher is trying to compete with Amazon is like saying a publisher is trying to compete with Pete Sampras. They don’t even play the same game.
More to the point, publishers are – or always have been – wholesalers. Substitute “Barnes and Noble” for “Amazon” and it becomes patently clear that publishers are not trying to compete with Barnes and Noble. That’s a non sequitur. Yet the common journalistic wisdom seems to frame every conversation about how the industry is at war with its outlets.
I think there’s some merit in the argument that they don’t like having to dance to the bookstore’s tune instead of having the power in that relationship, but that’s a really different problem.
It’s really easy to compete against 47North and Thomas and Mercer. People who’ve signed over titles to them are learning just how little Amazon is able to help them. The imprints are making the same kinds of mistakes the trad pubs make. They have Big Data that the trad pubs don’t have but they seem incapable of using it in ways that make sense. I’ve talked to them myself and the only things they’re offering authors are the same things that a) I can do for myself on a cash-basis and b) reduced access to sales and performance data compared to being self pubbed. When 47North can’t give me sales numbers *today* but are operating on a 90 day delay while still relying on me to do the marketing? That doesn’t help me at all.
Oddly enough, I have a friend, H. Paul Honsinger, who is writing the Men of War trilogy (To Honor You Call Us, For Honor We Stand, and a third yet to be written) who got shopped by 47North. He’s very happy with what they’ve been doing with him – multi-person team of copy editors, costume designer for the cover art, unabridged audiobook etc. Apparently, 47North is treating this as their flagship Space Opera/Space Military SciFi trilogy. We’ll see how it works out for him, but he seems to be hoping for an improvement in sales on the order of 20-50x what he has now. I’m not sure how or where he’s really expecting that to come from. I’ve pointed him at your discussions on the topic, and the Business Rusch – and I’m hoping all the best for him – but… we’ll see. He did at least retain movie/TV rights, so that’s good. And he’s a former Family Law attorney, so at least he’s used to ugly fights.
They do pretty well right up to the launch.
When it comes time to actually *sell* books … not so much.
They could be doing a lot better.
And I *really* hate losing my daily reporting and the delays in royalty payment that come with 47North offers.
It does seem silly that they would hide information from you that they could just as easily still give you.
20-50x does sound pathologically optimistic. =)
I agreed with you for the most part, as I said. I only objected to the idea that the only way to compete is to compete on all fronts.
Re 47North an Thomas & Mercer, I don’t have personal experience with either, but Seth Harwood has been effusive about how big an impact signing with T&M has had for his sales, and he *does* already have an audience, like yourself, so while I am by no means saying you should sign with them, I think it’s worth keeping an open mind about whether they may bring value to other authors. This is veering off on a tangent, though. 🙂
Not really. As things stand, finding stuff to read on Amazon can be really inefficient. You can hit the “also bought” lists, certainly, and eyeball the star ratings and the sales positions, but you’ve also got to keep an eye on the estimated length/file size, so you don’t buy a $12.99 5-page short story. There is a role yet for publishers, but it’s going to take time for the smaller publishers who actually understand what that new role will be to grow to the point where people will once more trust the imprint. Doubleday, Baen, Ace, Simon & Schuster, Penguin – all had their niche, and did a nice job of winnowing out a lot of chaff from the slush piles. Now, Amazon *IS* the slush pile, and *EVERYONE* has become the slush pile readers to sort things out.
I agree with you Tara that Amazon has become the slush pile. I have started to read the sneak peeks of a number of sf books lately on Amazon and poor grammar, clumsy sentence construction, dumb plots and bad science seems to have become the norm.