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Originally Posted by BearMountainBooks
I'd agree that Amazon is no longer courting indie writers. They offer advertising for us, but not the most lucrative ads.
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Discover ability is the great bugaboo for most quality authors these days. (for the not so quality author, their bugaboo is that they can't write well) Back in the day, discover ability was pretty easy. Most major bookstores had a new books shelf in each section, so just go to the shelf, and scan for books that looked interesting.
There were also publishers who specialized in genres, so just find a publisher with similar taste as yourself. I was fortunate in that I am a SF&F fan and Jim Baen started his publishing company right about the time I got out of college. That's how I found a lot of my favorite authors.
Part of Baen's success during the mid 90's is that he set up a website with forums and had authors who were willing to invest time and effort interacting with the readers on those forums. Authors would post snippets of up coming books and he had enough top authors that he had at least one major release every two to three months.
Of course, what happened was the usual. Over time, it was no longer new and various authors dropped out of posting. The forums started to became somewhat cliquish and eventually Baen died. While I do still read some Baen authors, the new publisher doesn't have the same taste and eye for talent that Baen had.
So far, I haven't seen anyone else capture the magic that Baen had during the late 90's and early 2000's in that regard. Tor has a pretty decent news letter that comes out on a regular basis, so it's easy to see what new stuff is coming out, but the other part of the formula is stuff that I'm interested in, and there are only a couple of Tor authors that I like.
I really expected discover ability to be much further along by this point. I figured that people would have web sites and news letters and the ebook stores would have tools that made it easy for me to find what I wanted to read. I expected like authors to start to band together in communities, kind of like the old Baen's Bar. I think I missed the boat on two points.
First, the amount of work involved and the ability to monetize the effort. Sites like authoralert do a pretty good job of letting me know when new books are coming out by favored authors. But they rather obviously are having money problems and they don't do a good job with ebook only releases. It's a lot of work and not much money. For it to be effective, it has to be up to date and have new content every day.
The second is that I expected there would be a lot more competition among ebook stores. At one time, we had four major corporations in the mix (Amazon, Apple, Sony and B&N) plus a lot of small companies. I figured you would end with at least two major competitors from that mix. The publishers tried to encourage that competition much like the music industry did, but Amazon with the help of the US government managed to stop the effort while both Sony and B&N showed themselves inept. So Amazon, having achieve an overwhelming share of the market and having set up some pretty big barriers for entry into the market, has little motivation to innovate with regards to their ebook store. It hasn't changed much from a function point of view since 2010 and their recommendations seems more oriented towards what they want to market rather than what I want to read.
I do think that eventually, someone will enter the fray, if only from a different angle. Apple's iTune didn't lose market share to another iTune's like store, but rather to music streaming companies. To a certain extent, companies like Pandora, Spotify and now Apple Music, solve the discover ability issue in various ways. Apple has currated playlists (some pretty good), while pandora uses internal algorithms plus the thumbs to fine tune the playlist. I suspect that something similar will happen with ebooks. I'm not sure what it will be, but there is enough money in ebooks to attract some attempts.