Quote:
Originally Posted by DiapDealer
But the main thing I took away from the article isn't that books are different than Diet Coke. It's that Hachette (and other publishers) could have protected themselves from Amazon had they chosen to re-distribute the disparate margins (that ebooks offered over their print counterparts) in the form of increased author royalties. Now it's probably too late to do so. And rather than reaping the benefits that a larger, happier (and very likely more prestigious) stable of authors would have provided them, they're going to have to hand over those margins to Amazon ... all because of short-sightedness (which they seem to have in abundance).
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You nailed it.
Behind over the smokescreen of "Amazon extortion" is the angst that the NYC corporate publishers are becoming irrelevant (worse, unnecessary) to the author--relationship.
They created the whole system of ever-declining payday loans and miniscule royalties where they see great financial reports every quarter while most of their authors see zilch, where Hachette authors with 20 and 40 title backlists fret that without Amazon pre-order buttons they won't make mortgage money. (I'm... skeptical... But I haven't checked to see how many of their titles hachette has in print and how many they're squatting on.)
Amazon's real crime against publishing isn't discounting or demanding co-payments for the services they provide to publishers; it is fostering the emergence of a reputable indie publishing industry where midlist authors can and do make mortgage money without 40-title backlists and pre-order buttons, and where many, after only two-three years are in fact quitting the day job.
Amazon KDP is the real threat: it not only made indie titles respectable, it forced other ebook vendors to start their own indiepub systems (Nook, Kobo) or at a minimum partner with aggregator front-ends like Smashwords (Apple, Google, Tolino?).
When your author contracts are so bad, any viable alternative is an existential threat to their business model, though not the company. But rather than face the upstream threat (which owes a lot of its momentum to the conspiracy--they created the environment for indies to prosper) they choose to attack and cripple their own downstream distribution system.
They're angry at Amazon.
We all get it by know.
(Never mind that Amazon only pivoted towards indies in response to the conspiracy.)
But if they don't deal with their upstream problem fast, pretty soon they won't have much of a downstream problem. They'll survive just fine off Patterson and their backlist rights but without new authors they'll all just end up merged into the randy penguin.
The longer this hissy fit goes on, the more tradpub authors will start to question why they aren't at least experimenting with indie releases. And once they see how that plays out...
Odds are their fight with Amazon is about a few odd percentage points. Well, keeping their authors once they taste hybrid publushing is going to cost them 20-25 points... Or lead to something far worse: time-limited contracts.
Wrong fight, wrong time.
Edit: here's one of many lists online of authors willing to talk about their (modest, mostly) success enabling them to move to full time writing:
http://www.thepassivevoice.com/05/20...heir-day-jobs/
These aren't Patterson-class multimillionaires but rather cottage industry entrepreneurs making a living at what they love.