If you wonder what the deal is on the pricing of the new book on Amazon—it’s this. Penguin, which distributes DAW, wants to set the price of its e-book offerings. Penguin apparently pulled its e-titles from Amazon. Now Amazon has retaliated by selling Penguin-distributed books, including mine, at below half price. I don’t know how this will affect what I get paid, but this isn’t going to help the already-shaky finance of the book industry, which is already unable to deal properly with new writers and is being run by oil companies who don’t know beans about books or readers. Amazon, which sells everything in the universe, isn’t going to be hurt that badly if the whole book industry collapses.
Readers and writers and of course publishers will get hurt. The world of books and literature will be hurt. This is getting ugly. And may get worse. What happens when publishers close their doors and sell off all their rights to Amazon?
What happens when the people who sell everything and anything begin publishing all the books in the English language—read, publishing everything, no matter what its quality or origin, or copyright status? We’ve got Google on one side asserting they’ve got the right to publish everything, copyrighted or not, paying nobody, Amazon on the other, asserting they’ll publishing anything no matter the quality, with no care or guidance to the authors at all, and pay what they want—and I don’t think it’ll be good.
Support your local writer. We’re going to need all the help we can get to stay alive.
I was totally unaware of this state of affairs. Seems like self-publishing in whatever form may be the future.
Personally, I blame Steve Jobs and the iPad. They started getting all buddy-buddy with the publishers who wanted to set prices for ebooks instead of letting the market set the price. Things went from bad to worse with that.
Agree with Stephen but…….until that day: I buy most of my stuff at B&N, heavily discounted due to membership, special coupons etc. The service is the big incentive. I am not sure how this effects your share *so* I have decided to make a small donation directly to the author concerned.
This whole things *sucks dead monkey meat* (Is that printable?) Sounds like everybody but Amazon loses at this game. In the end I can’t see any winners. 🙁
Yes, this does not bode well. As a novice writer this is very discouraging. I resigned from a federal career after a chronic case of integrity to go into business for myself and pursue my own interests and dreams.
I am writing a novel that goes against all convention: My main characters are almost all anti-heroes, scarred jaded veterans, who have turned their backs on their respective cultures to do what they feel is right. Not the youth on his first great quest which is typical. The prose can be as choppy as Beowulf or Homer, I use more big words than Gene Wolfe.I constantly break grammar and tense rules to have the characters speak exactly how I picture them. My elves swear in Old English when they get emotional.I use an excruciating amount of detail and no internal dialog. And the list goes on… http://xenophon.page.tl/Novel-Sample.htm
The point of that is… I knew that a first novel like this would be a very hard sell. But in a market like this new authors that decide to stray so far from convention to create something new are stepping into a noose of severe disappointment.
Writing to earn a living would be nice, but is not my goal. I just want to create something different and lasting. The current literary world already stifles creativity for marketability, so I can’t imagine what kind of Donner Party this type of climate would create for authors.
Google has announced that they will be launching Google Editions – paid versions of e-books – in June or July.
They haven’t finalized pricing, but first indications are that the publisher/author will get 63% of the income. There will be no digital rights management, and e-books will be readable in many different formats/devices.
This may actually be very good news. Amazon will have a major competitor, and the whole area of e-books may be opened up. Google is saying that small independent publishers will benefit, and that authors/publishers will get a greater share of income than at present.
We will have to wait to see what the impact actually is, but there is no doubt that one way or another this will have a major effect on the whole industry.
Some articles about this:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/10098111.stm
http://www.pcworld.com/article/195560/google_to_launch_ebook_store_early_summer.html
http://www.dailytech.com/Google+Goes+to+War+This+Summer+Against+Amazon+in+EBook+Arena/article18302.htm
Thanks for posting the links. Some have asked for them.
It’s going to get darker before the dawn, for sure. And we appreciate beyond telling the support of our readers…without that, optimistic as I am about the future, I would worry about my own.
It’s going to be hard for readers to sort out who’s worth reading and who’s not ready for prime time.
I have the notion that imminently we’re going to see Godzilla and Mothra battling it out in the streets, in the form of Google and Amazon, and I don’t think the oil companies are going to be too interested in these little acquisitions they made (the publishing companies) back when the tax situation for them looked like a shelter. Things changed. They aren’t a shelter. And I don’t think the oil giants are going to fight for them in the least.
But I stand by my faith in the readers to do that, and to support creators of what they like.
My advice to new writers right now is try to band together and support each other: get with others doing the same thing, and interlink, because I don’t think the battling giants are going to care overmuch about your rights or your future. Computer skills are going to count; and don’t sign anything that gives or sells away your e-rights to your created property: always insist they’re recoverable in the event of non-performance within a time frame; prefer to sign with anybody who is willing to be ‘non-exclusive’, meaning you can sell multiple places; and if called on to deliver exclusivity, put in a clause that says the rights revert to the author if annual sales fall below a certain figure. That’s your best protection in any agreement with Godzilla.
Thank you for this information – it’s more helpful to me than anything any agent or publisher has communicated to me in five years.
I’m sad for authors, for publishers, not so much. From my point of view every time they have had a decision to make they have made a foolish one. As an example, the agency model that they forced on Amazon actually nets them less money than with the old model. And frankly the people at the publishers who make the financial decisions are probably not thinking about how to keep their authors in food and clothing.
As far as Apple goes, they are not in the book business and are not known for their kindness to the suppliers of content for their devices and yet publishers happily hopped into bed with Steve.
And remember when the Kindle first came out, Steve Jobs said, “Nobody reads anymore.”
Can you say Publishers (and by that I mean the people making the financial decisions) are idiots.
I’m betting that they aren’t so great to their authors either.
I pre-ordered the book a couple of months ago, and I admit I was wondering what was going on when I received my shipping confirmation e-mail with such an insanely low price. I can’t really buy local, living in a smallish kind of place, so online ordering of books is my lifeline. Do you have any suggestions of what we can do to influence this current battle?
I, also, have received my shipping confirmation with such a low price that I did a double-take. Then I realized what was going on.
I’m in agreement with Smartcat’s comment above – I intend to make a donation through CC to make up for the author fallout due to Amazon and Penguin’s little war. I’ve already contacted another Penguin author whose book I purchased just a couple days ago – his price was also affected. Since I’m part of a group who reads books together a couple times a year, we all bought the book at the same time, and we were thinking of sending him a check to cover the difference.
Thank you, Skitterling. CC is a big help to us…not to mention the moral support.
I wish I knew. Sending letters to Amazon? To Google? Ask them to respect author’s rights? Lawyers have tried it.
Publishing companies were rooted in the Victorian era and believed they were the exception to economics. They have an internal culture that says people will always buy books—true, but: they’ve never faced the technology that rivals them FOR books. And up to 10 years ago, many publishers didn’t even have a computer in their offices, didn’t know how to run them. When I asked my publisher’s sales person back in the 9o’s whether they were soliciting Amazon, they didn’t know what Amazon was.
It’s not good.
skitterling, That is very noble of you and you receive major kudos from me.
Unfortunately, I may be part of the problem. I am very frugal by nature, or a cheap bastard if you will. I own approximately 4,000 books at the moment. 98% or more of which are used or inherited. It is a very rare thing for me to buy a new book while there are used bookstores and libraries out there. Why wait for an author to finish a series when there are so many other books out there I haven’t read yet?
So I hope Mrs. Cherryh doesn’t hate me for being thrifty. I have read most of her works and only paid full price for two of them. Btw my favorite was Angel With The Sword.
Xenophon, it’s no skin off my nose! I have something around 4,000 books myself, the vast majority of which are used. I just have a double handful of writers I will buy brand-new, as soon as it hits the market, so I can devour it with kraken-like greed. As I consider these writers a primary source of entertainment and inspiration, in return, I try to support them as best as I can.
I think ebooks are going to open the market up for newer writers, like yourself, and I’m looking forward to that, because I’m always short of something fun or educational to read (not to mention short of funds). But in the meantime, I intend to make sure CJ and Jane, and a few others, always have food and heat, and electricity for the computers!
The used book trade has always existed and I don’t complain about it. It assures books get saved for other generations. I myself won’t throw away a book and there has to be a place to send them, or I drown in them.
I don’t think I’ve ever bought a hardback for full price. Why is what Amazon did any different than the coupon I used at Borders or the crazy sales they have at Costco? Politics aside, a similar thing happened with Harry Potter books as far as prices go and I think the publishers and the author still made the same per sale…it was the store that took the hit out of its markup. If Amazon sells a book at that discount isn’t it Amazon that takes the hit from its markup? Either way, this move by Amazon is just act IV in a long debacle. I find it hard to rally to one side or another when everyone has their moment in the spotlight. With probably the exception of the author who has the least influence in these things.
Dust off the Harry Potter story:
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article2106058.ece
While Amazon and Apple and Google battle it out I don’t see any winners amongst the readers and the authors. I suspect a lot of lawyers will get rich and somewhen down the line there’ll be an anti-trust case that will lead to the big three getting broken up.
I also suspect that there will be a number of smaller players who will get the chance to grow, probably four or six will get to be medium sized. In a way it’s a very similar type of fight that is going on in the music industry and probably soon also for the movies as well.
When I see the way it is all going, it makes me pretty sad as we are in the situation in which the market is controlled by the people who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
The UK used to have something called the Net Book Agreement which set a fixed price for books. The big supermarkets eventually got it scrapped so they could sell the top 20 books as loss leaders and the indie and small chain bookshops went to the wall as those top twenty were the difference between staying in business for them and just another grocery item for the supermarkets. It was all done in the name of consumer choice. So now I have the choice of Waterstones in my high street, a shop so well organised that they keep putting JRR Tolkien in the Crime section or Amazon.
Speaking of which – Amazon UK has just emailed me putting back Foreigner 11 until the end of the month.
I live on a restricted income but still buy hardcovers. I consider it my duty to support writers I like. I just got Deceiver at Borders-sorry, no independent had it-and a couple of weeks ago I bought Neil Sheehan’s A Fiery Peace In A Cold War, a very good book that fills in some big gaps in post WW2 history. If I don’t buy the books who will?
Phil Brown
Exactly! 😀
I can see us headed for the day, soon — if not already here, when there will be two kinds of publishers, the mega-giants and the very small fry. The small fry will publish two or three books a year and the mega-giants will publish everything else. The authors are going to get squeezed and the readers are going to see a diminution of interesting new work. Back in the day, you usually didn’t know who was editing a publisher’s stf line, but you could recognize a consistency of choices. Basically, if you liked one book published by Ace or Ballantine or DAW, you’d stand a better than good chance of liking the rest of that publisher’s line.
Back when DAW was editing the line that bears his name, I found that I could pretty much buy anything he published with confidence. I took a chance on a book by a new writer named Cherryh and had never regretted it.
When the only publisher is Googazon, who will we pick the talented newcomer from the not-ready-for-prime-time?
I’m playing devil’s advocate here, but the answer is that Google Editions has a model which will actively support small publishers. A small publishing house, or one or more authors, will have their own ‘store’ on Google Editions where they can sell whatever books they own the copyright for. Google will take 37% or whatever percentage they finally decide on, the rest will go to the author/publisher.
Rather than destroying small publishers it may provide an environment where small publishers can thrive again. This is Google’s stated intention. We know that the best of good intentions can go wrong, but I think it’s a mistake to be too pessimistic about this.
The advantage for authors and small publishers is that they will have access to a market where vast numbers of people worldwide will be browsing every day.
In a year’s time people may be going to Google Editions the same way that they go to Amazon today. The difference will be that when they type in ‘Cherryh’ they will see a ‘store’ where the same books which are now on CC will be displayed for sale alongside Cherryh books published by other publishers. Most of proceeds of that store will go directly to the author. It means reaching orders of magnitude more readers than CC could ever reach by itself.
Buyers will be able to read ebooks online on their computers or phones, or download for any ebook reader.
Google still has to come out with pricing guidelines, but I expect that within broad limits they will allow the copyright holder to set any price they like. This will end Amazon’s monopoly because Google is big enough that publishers who are assured of selling via Google Editions will be able withdraw their books from Amazon without suffering losses.
So overall I feel that this is a positive development. It will be interesting to see how it works out.
The Amazon Penguin snit should actually increase your royalties — emphasis on the word should. I am assuming that the Penguin contract is similar to the other major publishing contracts that have been mucho in the news. Please correct me if I am wrong, but if that is a correct assumption then Amazon has paper Penguin sales on a wholesale contract. So, Amazon pays the fixed wholesale price to Penguin regardless of what Amazon sells it for. So, Amazon may be subsidizing your royalties, but the decreased sales price should be good for total sales. Amazon is doing this to turn up the heat on Penguin over ebook pricing. The major houses have been taking the position that discounted pricing “devalues” books in the eyes of the reader.
To me, the real question isn’t how long Amazon is willing to subsidize Penguin sales prices. To me, the real question is how much are ebook sales going to be hurt by the new move to agency pricing? What will happen if Apple doesn’t renew its agency pricing contracts at the end of the first year? What will happen if agency pricing spreads to paper books prohibiting B & N (and Amazon and others) to offer any type of clubs or discounts? What will happen if ebook sales are off enough this quarter for the authors with sufficient sales volume to make a stink raise their publisher’s fiduciary duty to market the author’s products — not price them out of the market?
The publishing industry is going to change. People will still read and buy books (maybe even more so for the first time in my adult lifetime, since all available evidence says that people who buy readers start reading and buying more books than they did before). Authors will still write and sell books. Everything else may change. We may have to develop new ways to do everything else, but readers and authors will come out of this ok. Publisher? I’m not so sure about.
As for Amazon not respecting authors’ rights, I don’t believe that they care two figs for them; but I haven’t seen anything that they have done so far that adversely impacts authors’ rights. Royalties are based on what the publisher receives, and that has not changed under the Penguin contract. It has changed under the agency contracts governing most ebook sales, and the author’s share has declined precipitously; but that was forced on Amazon by the publishers — not the other way around.
So, what am I missing?
Well, and there’s the fact that I have never been paid for an e-book, that I have been able to detect, not from Amazon, not from Fictionwise, or any other source out there. I don’t know who’s doing the accounting, but I am not getting any report from these sources, either directly or through my publishers, and if I’m not getting paid, I’m not greatly in favor of them.
Does Baen pay you for “The Paladin” which is available in their E-bookstore? They certainly have a reputation for doing right there — so I’d hope so.
Of course, in some cases it may not be the ultimate e-book publisher that’s screwing the author, it may be the original publisher who contracted it out in the first place …
Seems like you should get your agent to rattle the trees at Amazon. They’ve had those 9 books up for a long while.
well, I think I get a couple hundred dollars a year from them. So yes, they’re the one exception. But I’d have to look at the contract to find out if they actually have e-book rights.
no discount on Amazon uk ….but there’s a marketplace seller offering the book for the same price and it’s in stock now Apf!
@Purplejulian I’ll check that out thank you for the heads-up.
It’s similar to what’s happening in the Music and Video industries. You’ve got the artists, and you’ve got the monopolists who want to control everything. Amazon may sell a lot of books, but they are dangerous to the artists (authors). If Amazon gets control of a major portion of the industry, and manages to put enough publishers out of business, then authors will find that the only place to sell is Amazon, and watch the royalties drop as Amazon ‘monetizes’ their investment.
The best option for a writer may be to retain electronic rights. Let Amazon sell hard copies, and you sell soft copies. May. I’m not sure that this would work, in part because I expect Amazon wouldn’t be willing to work that way, and I suspect that they may try to move to only carrying books that they publish.
You need to consider lobbying. One part of copyright reform that I suggested in Canada was that copyright could only be owned by the author, with the option of leasing it out for a term of no longer than five years, with no automatic renewals. The aim of this is to keep control in the hands of the author, and limit the power of the publishers, and since Amazon is setting themselves up as a publisher… Of course the Canadian government doesn’t seem to be paying attention to me 🙂
Wayne
A 5 year standard would be a very good deal.