Quote:
Originally Posted by DiapDealer
Gonna go out on a not-so-skinny limb here and say that if Koontz's apub-published books/ebooks aren't available everywhere books/ebooks are sold, it will because someone refuses to sell apub-published books/ebooks. Not because Koontz will have agreed to any kind of exclusive sales deal with Amazon.
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Your limb is made of steel.
APub books, both digital and print are now and have long been available via Ingram.
(Edit: pbooks, always, ebooks since 2012:
https://www.theverge.com/2012/8/29/3...rnes-and-noble)
What keeps them out of B&N and other retailers is the anti-APub boycott launched by B&N and the AAP.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...-boycott-grows
As things stand, AmazonPublishing gets all the benefits of exclusivity without any of the antitrust negatives. Since nobody else wants to carriy their books, their sales concentrate at Amazon's store, which raises them in the rankings and boosts sales though higher visibility. That is why, on the ebook side, they dropped their list price from $8-9 to $5.
For that matter, price isn't Amazon LLC's biggest competitive advantage: it's distribution. Just as with other publisher books, they get them direct from the publisher and Ingram gets nothing. The same applies to AmazonPublishing: as long as the boycott stands their Ingram expenses as minimal and they can eat them, treating all sales as coming from Amazon LLC.
Since Amazon LLC moves over 50% of all pbooks and over 70% of ebooks, none of which go through Ingram it is easy to see how giving the Ingram share to the author could make APub's offer better at 50% of print than a BPH deal.
APub killed their SCOUT (ebook only) program but while it ran it offered rates of 50% of net instead of 25%. Given a typical 30%of cover distribution charge from KDP that meant that SCOUT titles paid out 35% of cover instead of of 17.5% of cover. The program offered a fairly low advance on their five year contract but it was only for ebook rights. It had no shortage of candidate titles.
Their terms for agented authors are NDA'ed but their authors seem very happy, as reported by Publishing Perfection:
https://publishingperspectives.com/2...erspectives%29
Koontz isn't the only one going to APub in the near term.
Cornwall and Weir are also in the pipeline.
Unlike the authors that signed with APub ten years ago when they ran out of New York, the current batch of authors know of the boycott and are shrugging it off.
As Shatskin said in his post earlier this week, things could get interesting on the tradpub side.
https://www.idealog.com/blog/a-lot-h...ast-ten-years/