Quote:
Originally Posted by GlenBarrington
Amazon goes out of its way to make me feel they want my business.
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It's not just readers they actively try to engage.
A good portion of Amazon's success stems from their willingness to work with Indie publishers, in contrast with most of their competitors. Apple, for example, only accepted indie titles through aggregators, like Smashwords. They've moved past that but they still only accept uploads coming from Macs. Authors working on PCs still need to go through aggregators or go through an online virtual mac service. B&N was worse: a few years back they were caught systematically downlisting Indie romance titles by a hundred slots to keep them off the first page of the genre rankings. They stopped once they were called on it but the memory lingers.
Kobo was never that bad and they have recently upped their efforts to draw in Indie titles but for years their Indie support noticeably lagged Amazon. And playing catchup isn't going to be easy. They are trying and their overdrve support should be of some help but they are starting pretty far back.
The consequence of that is reflected in the number of Indie publishers willing to be Amazon exclusive, even before Kindle unlimited started up. With KU now delivering more income to its authors than the other ebookstores, it is going to get increasingly harder to peel off those titles from the Kindle catalog. The market advantage Kindle gains from that extra million titles is significant and growing more so every month.
The mistakes of the past linger.