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Originally Posted by Barcey
Amazon is in the business of giving the customer what the customer wants. The publishers are in the business of giving the customer what the publishers want. We'll see who wins.  |
I've said before that the corporate publishers do marketing (though very little of it is effective for midlisters) but do no market research. That is why they throw stuff at the wall to see what sticks and then stampede to me-too anything that sticks for a second.
They have no idea what consumers want next, just what consumers wanted last year or last month. Other, smaller, publishers have closer ties to their readers but the big boys are locked up in their glass towers more worried about internal politics and making their quarterly numbers than about what readers want to read.
One thing the Amazon report has already achieved with their statement is to get the "Authors" Guild (and other BPH apologists) to finally and openly admit for all to see that high ebook prices (and low ebook royalties) are to slow down ebook adoption and to protect the pbooks-on-shelves business model, not to protect literature or subsidize non-fiction or anything worthy. It's their own goldplated overhead they're protecting.
http://online.wsj.com/news/article_e...MDIwOTEyNDkyWj
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The Authors Guild, at least, didn’t appear to be mollified. It criticized Amazon’s suggestion for lower retail prices. “Lower e-book prices aren’t necessarily the best thing for writers,” said Roxana Robinson, president of the Authors Guild. “We get a percentage of the price as a royalty. You also have to take into consideration the price of the hardcover. Yes, it’s cheap to make a digital book but it’s expensive to present a book in hardcover.”
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Good to know the price you pay for what you want is artificially inflated to prop up what you don't want, huh? To paraphrase Bezos: "Your overhead is my competitive advantage."
Check this one:
http://barryeisler.blogspot.com/2014...is-amazon.html
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As I starting pointing out about three years ago, “The current business imperative of legacy publishing is to preserve the position of paper and retard the growth of digital.” Why? Because although the legacy industry offers various value-added services (at least in theory), the only critical service they’ve ever offered — the only one an author couldn’t get any other way — has always been paper distribution. Paper distribution is the foundation on which the legacy industry built its agglomerated business model. That is: “You want distribution? Then you’ll have to take all the services you could have outsourced for a flat fee elsewhere (editing, jacket design, etc) along with it, and you’ll have to pay 85% of earnings for the agglomerated package.”
But in a digital world, authors don’t need distribution services from publishers. In digital, individual authors have exactly the same distribution reach as any corporate publishing partner, and for the same flat rate of 30%. Digital is changing the role of publishers from something authors needed to something authors might, for reasons separate from distribution, merely want.
Having the nature of your business go from “I’m a business necessity and the only game in town” to “If I can prove my value, authors might still want me” represents a cataclysmic change for legacy players.
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