Yes. That's because in most cases these operations amount to self-publishing -- not by amateurs but by long-standing professional authors (some of whom, like Linda Nagata, are past Hugo and Nebula winners) who are bringing their older work back into print themselves, or publishing newer work that larger publishers don't see a market for. The work that the publishers would pay for out of their cut of the cake is here being paid for by the authors -- employing editors, typesetters, and book designers directly (or doing the jobs themselves).
The major difference between these and the Amazon self-pub model is that (a) Amazon isn't taking 30-70% of the revenue if you buy from these sites, and (b) the authors in question have some reputation (seriously, with people like Linda Nagata, C. J. Cherryh and Walter Jon Williams self-publishing, self-pub is no longer a guarantee of poor quality, as it was a decade or more ago).
]]>I am inclined to think that sums up the nature of SF fandom. There is still room for us and them, but there is a shared passion. And that is partly why Amazon feels different.
And while ten years later the Internet was exploding across the country, a lot of the social structures had evolved already, in the SF magazines and in the fanzines, and in the APAs.
I have just started feeling horribly old.
]]>I would expect a flood of how-to-publish-with-Kindle courses to follow.
It all looks so obvious.
]]>Ho Hum..Really? And extending from that on Amazon... the thing is that Big A is easy to use, almost oni-present, if not quite omnipotent, and ..Feed in any given title and the chances are you'd get the book of choice and a route to purchase that is easy to follow.
As for ... " BVC is the largest and most-successful (to my knowledge) of author publishing cooperatives. The business has inherent economies of scale and advantages in business structure which enable it to provide 95% of sales to authors."
Well first you have had to have to have heard of it! I hadn't and I've been about in Fandom ever such a long time - err, actually a bit longer than our Gracious Host...yes, I am that OLD ..Oh the horror of it all!
I'd like to think that Publishing Co-Ops represent a challenge to Amazon type " all the market will bear in the way of profit " type avaricious capitalism but such co-ops won’t work as as a serious alternative to Amazon until they develop from Very Specialist publications that appeal to - just say Lesbian, Gay, or Transgender folk ..Or indeed science fiction /fantasy enthusiasts- and develop towards a much broader readership who know of the existence of the co-operative and can be persuaded to give a damn where they buy their e books from...or for that matter where they borrow their public library books from.
Hereabouts in the U.K. public branch libraries have been downsized into non-existence in many cities and thus the first rung of the ladder for many readers in the U.K. has ceased to exist...people who borrow public library books in childhood may latter buy books. I did and Do continue to do so whilst the current generation of Video Game playing Audio Visual Media consuming buyers may not experience these BOOK things past their school days.
The problem is more than just that of head butting Amazon.
The thing is that Amazon as a commercial organisation has NO emotional commitment to BOOKS...None Whatsoever. Amazon is just the latest incarnation of the Department Store, so, from Wikipedia...
“The origins of the department store lay in the growth of the conspicuous consumer society at the turn of the 19th century. As the Industrial Revolution accelerated economy expansion, the affluent middle-class grew in size and wealth. This urbanized social group, sharing a culture of consumption and changing fashion, was the catalyst for the retail revolution. As rising prosperity and social mobility increased the number of people with disposable income in the late Georgian period, window shopping was transformed into a leisure activity and entrepreneurs, like the potter Josiah Wedgwood, pioneered the use of marketing techniques to influence the prevailing tastes and preferences of society. [1]
One of the first department stores may have been Bennett's in Derby, first established as an ironmongers in 1734. [2] It still stands to this day, trading in the same building. However, the first reliably dated department store to be established, was Harding, Howell & Co, which opened in 1796 on Pall Mall, London.[3] An observer writing in Ackermann's Repository, a British periodical on contemporary taste and fashion, described the enterprise in 1809 as follows:
The house is one hundred and fifty feet in length from front to back, and of proportionate width. It is fitted up with great taste, and is divided by glazed partitions into four departments, for the various branches of the extensive business, which is there carried on. Immediately at the entrance is the first department, which is exclusively appropriated to the sale of furs and fans. The second contains articles of haberdashery of every description, silks, muslins, lace, gloves, &etc. In the third shop, on the right, you meet with a rich assortment of jewelry, ornamental articles in ormolu, french clocks, &etc.; and on the left, with all the different kinds of perfumery necessary for the toilette. The fourth is set apart for millinery and dresses; so that there is no article of female attire or decoration, but what may be here procured in the first style of elegance and fashion. This concern has been conducted for the last twelve years by the present proprietors who have spared neither trouble nor expense to ensure the establishment of a superiority over every other in Europe, and to render it perfectly unique in it's kind. "Amazon is " perfectly unique in its kind " and it will dump books in an instant if the Book Department isn't making enough money.
Nor is it alone in this. The Local version of Harrods - the very famous London store - is Fenwick’s Of Newcastle and Fenwick’s used to have a really good bakery that supplied my favourite - SOB!!! - Rye bread. A year or three ago they discovered that they could downsize their bread and cakes and stuff section and replace it with a kind of giant sweet section and still make loads a money ..They just didn't make enough money from people like me.
Sound familiar?
" self-pub is no longer a guarantee of poor quality, as it was a decade or more ago "
Absolutely true enough. BUT, Amazon is a Giant Department Store that can employ leverage across the entire field of printed literature and not care too much if they don’t succeed in being entirely successful in a minor campaign against any given publisher. Oh, they do care about sales and profit but they are terribly good in their chosen publishing model and can afford to fail, step back, and renew their attack with added public relations sauce...wots so very wrong with an e book standard price of ..Insert price...for WE are on the side of The Readers!
And if they decide that selling books and other such old fashioned printed stuff at their chosen price level isn’t making enough money? Well then their option is that of the Fenwicks Bread counter and they will dump books in a heart beat.
We care about books and they don’t and that is the way that it is, but the problem is that they are Very, Very, Large and hugely influential and so, baring the French approach to Amazon ? And serious large scale, multi publisher, multi national players...? Chance will be a fine thing ..
'Okay, we'll charge one cent' Amazon thumbed its nose at a French ban on free shipping of book orders, agreeing to raise the shipping price to exactly $0.01 Euros, or a single penny. France24 reports that Amazon’s move comes one month after the ban sailed through France’s National Assembly. Lawmakers argued that the nation’s roughly 3,500 bookstores needed protection from online competitors, whom they accused of “dumping” books on the market at a loss. '
http://time.com/2976723/amazon-france-free-shipping/
Ah well, maybe I’m being too glum and pessimistic .. did I mention that I’m even older and, now and then, even more cynical that Our Gratuitous Host ? .. No Doubt Something Will Turn Up!
There Must be a Lone Ranger who will turn up to save us at the last minute .. and who will look a bit like Santa Claus ...” Ho Ho Ho Silver Away!! “
]]>Education, leaning, reading? Can't have those, they're ELITIST!
The same arrogant morons wanted to close the William Morris Museum, until stopped by very loud shrieks.
]]>What, you haven't heard of the Loan Arranger?
]]>Dear KDP Author,
Just ahead of World War II, there was a radical invention that shook the foundations of book publishing. It was the paperback book. This was a time when movie tickets cost 10 or 20 cents, and books cost $2.50. The new paperback cost 25 cents – it was ten times cheaper. Readers loved the paperback and millions of copies were sold in just the first year.
With it being so inexpensive and with so many more people able to afford to buy and read books, you would think the literary establishment of the day would have celebrated the invention of the paperback, yes? Nope. Instead, they dug in and circled the wagons. They believed low cost paperbacks would destroy literary culture and harm the industry (not to mention their own bank accounts). Many bookstores refused to stock them, and the early paperback publishers had to use unconventional methods of distribution – places like newsstands and drugstores. The famous author George Orwell came out publicly and said about the new paperback format, if “publishers had any sense, they would combine against them and suppress them.” Yes, George Orwell was suggesting collusion.
Well… history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
Fast forward to today, and it’s the e-book’s turn to be opposed by the literary establishment. Amazon and Hachette – a big US publisher and part of a $10 billion media conglomerate – are in the middle of a business dispute about e-books. We want lower e-book prices. Hachette does not. Many e-books are being released at $14.99 and even $19.99. That is unjustifiably high for an e-book. With an e-book, there’s no printing, no over-printing, no need to forecast, no returns, no lost sales due to out of stock, no warehousing costs, no transportation costs, and there is no secondary market – e-books cannot be resold as used books. E-books can and should be less expensive.
Perhaps channeling Orwell’s decades old suggestion, Hachette has already been caught illegally colluding with its competitors to raise e-book prices. So far those parties have paid $166 million in penalties and restitution. Colluding with its competitors to raise prices wasn’t only illegal, it was also highly disrespectful to Hachette’s readers.
The fact is many established incumbents in the industry have taken the position that lower e-book prices will “devalue books” and hurt “Arts and Letters.” They’re wrong. Just as paperbacks did not destroy book culture despite being ten times cheaper, neither will e-books. On the contrary, paperbacks ended up rejuvenating the book industry and making it stronger. The same will happen with e-books.
Many inside the echo-chamber of the industry often draw the box too small. They think books only compete against books. But in reality, books compete against mobile games, television, movies, Facebook, blogs, free news sites and more. If we want a healthy reading culture, we have to work hard to be sure books actually are competitive against these other media types, and a big part of that is working hard to make books less expensive.
Moreover, e-books are highly price elastic. This means that when the price goes down, customers buy much more. We've quantified the price elasticity of e-books from repeated measurements across many titles. For every copy an e-book would sell at $14.99, it would sell 1.74 copies if priced at $9.99. So, for example, if customers would buy 100,000 copies of a particular e-book at $14.99, then customers would buy 174,000 copies of that same e-book at $9.99. Total revenue at $14.99 would be $1,499,000. Total revenue at $9.99 is $1,738,000. The important thing to note here is that the lower price is good for all parties involved: the customer is paying 33% less and the author is getting a royalty check 16% larger and being read by an audience that’s 74% larger. The pie is simply bigger.
But when a thing has been done a certain way for a long time, resisting change can be a reflexive instinct, and the powerful interests of the status quo are hard to move. It was never in George Orwell’s interest to suppress paperback books – he was wrong about that.
And despite what some would have you believe, authors are not united on this issue. When the Authors Guild recently wrote on this, they titled their post: “Amazon-Hachette Debate Yields Diverse Opinions Among Authors” (the comments to this post are worth a read). A petition started by another group of authors and aimed at Hachette, titled “Stop Fighting Low Prices and Fair Wages,” garnered over 7,600 signatures. And there are myriad articles and posts, by authors and readers alike, supporting us in our effort to keep prices low and build a healthy reading culture. Author David Gaughran’s recent interview is another piece worth reading.
We recognize that writers reasonably want to be left out of a dispute between large companies. Some have suggested that we “just talk.” We tried that. Hachette spent three months stonewalling and only grudgingly began to even acknowledge our concerns when we took action to reduce sales of their titles in our store. Since then Amazon has made three separate offers to Hachette to take authors out of the middle. We first suggested that we (Amazon and Hachette) jointly make author royalties whole during the term of the dispute. Then we suggested that authors receive 100% of all sales of their titles until this dispute is resolved. Then we suggested that we would return to normal business operations if Amazon and Hachette’s normal share of revenue went to a literacy charity. But Hachette, and their parent company Lagardere, have quickly and repeatedly dismissed these offers even though e-books represent 1% of their revenues and they could easily agree to do so. They believe they get leverage from keeping their authors in the middle.
We will never give up our fight for reasonable e-book prices. We know making books more affordable is good for book culture. We’d like your help. Please email Hachette and copy us.
]]>" Absolutely true enough. BUT, Amazon is a Giant Department Store that can employ leverage across the entire field of printed literature and not care too much if they don’t succeed in being entirely successful in a minor campaign against any given publisher. Oh, they do care about sales and profit but they are terribly good in their chosen publishing model and can afford to fail, step back, and renew their attack with added public relations sauce...wots so very wrong with an e book standard price of ..Insert price...for WE are on the side of The Readers!"
It’s blindingly fucking obvious what their spin would be...
" Oh, they do care about sales and profit but they are terribly good in their chosen publishing model and can afford to fail, step back, and renew their attack with added public relations sauce...wots so very wrong with an e book standard price of ..Insert price...for WE are on the side of The Readers!"
Oh GHODS the Guilt of it all, for way back before Spin was SPIN, in a political sense, and I was supporting Business Management Exercises before the HEAT of Studio Lights in my Business Schools T.V. Studios- for quite modest pay, though I did get free lunches - the students would protest at my, err, philosophy - which was,basicaly, "Train Hard Fight Easy! -- and say that," .. its all very well for you for YOU are at the other side of the cameras! You wouldn’t be so clever if YOU were at the sharp end " And so on, and so forth, until the day when I tired of such stuff and ,seizing the interview candidates briefing documentation and memorising the same, would do the sharp end for the entire session.I would lie...err that is to say freely interpret the situation in a manner adventagious to the interview candidate, which was me, for a dozen or so candidates.I would always be offered the job on fictional offer.
After I had done this - it was such FUN, but then I don’t...what is this Stage Fright thing of which you speak? The people who would be leading the session - at one time " Business Consultants " wasn't a term of vituperation - would point to me and ask the poor sods who would have given me the job whether I was faintly even OLD enough to have been plausible as a candidate for the jobs as described, and they would blink, and come down to reality.
Did I mention that I suffer from Light Triggered Dermatitis - other people suffer from sun burn but I am more sensitive...but, O.G.H s Vampires? Oh come Now...there's no such thing as Vampires...No, not even Tony Blair. We all Know that now don't we?
]]>Meanwhile: Dear Amazon, Some of us don't read ebooks. Please stop trying to kill bookstores.
]]>