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Originally Posted by Rizla
Did indie-writers (and therefore Amazon?) negatively impact the success of Samhain?
Also, did Samhain offer a higher quality of writing than indie-writers in general? If so, this would also suggest the (incidental) lowering of writing quality in the small publishing electronic market.
Which would seem to me to be a bad thing.
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To be honest, the thing that I think impacted small publishers AND indies in the last two plus years is when Amazon signed new agreements with the majors that included placement. You may remember the hoopla surrounding it--the majors had gotten a certain amount of placement "for free" in the past--certain perks just for being on Amazn. With the new agreements, apparently Amazon was charging for placement and charging more than the retailers wanted to pay (which gave them incentive to beef up their own sites). Eventually everything got signed, but no one knows for sure what that placement deals are--just that they exist and Amazon now takes a larger cut of money for placement than they used to (this is assumed from the rumors surrounding the deals). Aside: I think they also changed how the charge for 'warehousing' books from the majors--charging them more for teh whole distribution thing for paperbacks/hardbacks.
At any rate, I think the thing that changed is the algos and placement--they now favor the big publishers because the big publisher are paying for it and placement/mention. I can verify that about 2 years ago the search algos changed significantly on amazon and now favor HIGHER SALE items. In the past, my name either: Maria Schneider or Maria E Schneider would bring up my books at the top. Now, it brings up Maria Schneider the Jazz musician (she was around back then too and is actually quite famous). UNLESS someone is already drilled down to ebooks, her name comes up and you get varying results on my name with and without the middle initial. An author who is from Germany and is out of print comes up as the "see author Maria Schneider" now under books (to get mine the E is required). The author has not put out any new books and if she showed up in the old system, I never even knew she existed. This is not a complaint--but it's evidence of the changing algos. My books and my author page used to come up much closer to the top (or at the top) and did for years. I"m not the only one who has noticed these types of changes.
I've never had a problem with the quality of Samhain (Tuttle also originally published his All the Paths of Shadow series with a different small pub--that publisher also went under and the books were not as well copy edited as Samhain books).
So, no, I don't think that quality is the real issue here, not with Samhain, although some of the others who have read more titles can probably speak to that.
Indies are competition--for small AND large publishers. We compete mainly on price, but Amazon controls much of what is seen and how early it is seen. They have a HUGE, HUGE, HUGE number of eyeballs. Discoverability is an issue for all of us and getting on that first page is key. Amazon was simply more helpful to indies and small guys in the past--and they used that as leverage to get better deals with the majors.