AmazonPublishing primer

[fjtorres]

From the Atlantic, AmazonPublishing examined:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technolo...ishing/595630/

Founded in 2009, Amazon Publishing is far from the tech giant’s best-known enterprise, but it is a quietly consequential piece of the company’s larger strategy to become a one-stop shop for all your consumer decisions. As Amazon Studios does with movies, Amazon Publishing feeds the content pipelines created by the tech giant’s online storefront and Amazon Prime membership program. At its most extreme, Amazon Publishing is a triumph of vertical engineering: If a reader buys one of its titles on a Kindle, Amazon receives a cut both as publisher and as bookseller—not to mention whatever markup it made on the device in the first place, as well as the amortized value of having created more content to draw people into its various book-subscription offerings. (One literary agent summed it up succinctly to The Wall Street Journal in January: “They aren’t gaming the system. They own the system.”)

And Amazon Publishing is a culture-making juggernaut, even if the literati don’t much think about it. According to Peter Hildick-Smith, the CEO of the book-industry analysis firm the Codex Group, roughly 25.5 million U.S. households bought books in the past month, and fully a quarter of those households use Prime Reading, a feature of Amazon Prime that allows subscribers to borrow 10 items at a time from a catalog of 1,000 ebooks, magazines, and other media, including the tech giant’s originals.

Prime Reading is far from Amazon’s only reading subscription service. Kindle Unlimited, a similar program, costs an extra $9.99 and offers a wider selection of 1 million titles. The Prime Book Box for children includes a selection of age-appropriate books delivered regularly for $19.99. Amazon First Reads allows members to download a book a month earlier than the unsubscribed public for no extra cost. Often, First Reads are—you guessed it—Amazon Publishing titles, and they rocket up the Kindle best-seller charts as soon as they’re made available; A Fire Sparkling and What You Did both topped the charts in early July despite being due out August 1.

And then there’s Amazon’s 18 brick-and-mortar stores around the country, which sell print copies of Amazon Publishing titles, produced via a sophisticated print-on-demand operation. All told, these services overlap to create an ecosystem with the same aim and model as Prime: to lock customers into a regular subscription that shifts the center of their purchasing gravity to Amazon. The company’s distribution mechanisms then allow it to push its own titles to subscribers to keep them happy with their membership—not unlike how Netflix’s recommendation algorithm tells you to watch Netflix-produced films.

Amazon Publishing is still a relatively small fry: According to Hildick-Smith, it puts out 1,100 titles a year, compared with the 1,500 to 2,000 a large publishing house such as Simon & Schuster might publish.

Much more at the source.

This is not KDP.
It is not Indie publishing.
It is tradpub, agented, and independent from the world of KDP.

One more thing, as somebody or other used to say:

Many authors seem to love Amazon Publishing. Robert Dugoni, who has written 10 mystery and thriller novels for Amazon, inked a deal with the company in 2013, after becoming dissatisfied with the amount of advertising his previous publisher, Simon & Schuster, put behind his books. Amazon Publishing, he says, still promotes the opener of his ongoing mystery/thriller series, My Sister’s Grave, a six-year-old book, in Kindle Store promotions; Dugoni says he’s sold 1.5 million copies of that title and 5 million copies of all his books with Amazon Publishing since 2013. The “hunger” of Amazon Publishing’s employees, along with its reams of customer data and speedy editing process, impressed him, he says, to the point that he recently appeared in one of its marketing videos.

“They’re constantly reinventing marketing and promotion to keep my name and my books in front of readers,” Dugoni told me. “From an author’s perspective, that’s all I ever wanted: people to read my books.” Doyle called Amazon’s success with Dugoni—a reinvigoration of an established author who wasn’t selling well elsewhere—“emblematic of our goals.” In January, Mark Sullivan, an author who writes historical fiction and mysteries, relayed a similar story of a career revived by Amazon Publishing.

Note that AmazonPublishing makes its books available to all book sellers through Ingram but are effectively Amazon exclusive because B&N, the ABA, and others boycott their titles, only selling them if customers ask to "special order" them.

Amazon's reply?
AmazonBooks and Amazon 4-star.

As Nietzsche said: "That which doesn't kill us, makes us stronger."

[John F]

Are Amazon Publishing ebooks available to libraries?

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by John F

Are Amazon Publishing ebooks available to libraries?

Not sure.
I've seen reports that say Pbooks are but ebooks aren't. Uncomfirmed.

Amazon has deals with Overdrive but with the boycott and review magazines (a heavy influence of library buying) all ignoring their releases it's hard to tell if their absence is by policy. Or whose policy. For example, Overdrive has deals with Kobo and Smashwords to make Indie titles available to libraries but they're segregated into a separate, almost hidden, section of their catalog. By some reports, at the request of libraries.

It's like their absence from the NYT lists: the NYT long ago set a policy to ignore all books sold only by one store. Amazon doesn't reveal sales but even if APub did (does?) it wouldn't be used.

That's why Amazon.com publishes their own lists.

It's an amusing "war".

[leebase]

I'm a consumer of the Amazon publishing products. I recently wrote about it as I wrestled with whether I ultimately thought the "worth of my time" was more important than "reading for less money".

Mind you, I applaud Amazon's efforts. They have figured out what genre's I like to read and are constantly tempting me with book offers that I go "hmmm...yes....that looks interesting and I'd like to read it".

However...upon reflection of reading an Tim Tigner thriller ("if you like Bourne, you will like Tim Tigner")....the book while enjoyable....was nowhere near the quality of a Jason Bourne book or any other of the thriller authors I follow.

And I'm not talking about spelling errors or poor grammar. I'm talking the difference between hamburger and steak. They are both beef. They both taste good. But a hamburger is not a steak. Amazon publishing (that I've read) is hamburger at hamburger prices.

[jackie_w]

In the UK (and most other countries) Overdrive is epub only, isn't it? How could any Amazon ebooks be made available?

[binaryhermit]

Originally Posted by leebase

However...upon reflection of reading an Tim Tigner thriller ("if you like Bourne, you will like Tim Tigner")....the book while enjoyable....was nowhere near the quality of a Jason Bourne book or any other of the thriller authors I follow.

I don't think Tim Tigner is Amazon Publishing. I think he's self-published through KDP.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by binaryhermit

I don't think Tim Tigner is Amazon Publishing. I think he's self-published through KDP.

Looks like it; I checked one and it's listed as sold by Amazon Digital Publishing, with no publisher listed.

https://www.amazon.com/Pushing-Brill...NsaWNrPXRydWU=

Product details
File Size: 1733 KB
Print Length: 396 pages
Simultaneous Device Usage: Unlimited
Publication Date: July 14, 2016
Sold by: Amazon Digital Services LLC
Language: English
ASIN: B01H9DSUAW
Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
Enabled
Word Wise: Enabled
Lending: Not Enabled
Screen Reader: Supported
Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #500 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
#7 in Terrorism Thrillers (Kindle Store)
#7 in Men's Adventure Fiction (Kindle Store)
#4 in Action & Adventure (Kindle Store)

APub books, like FORGOTTEN BONES, look like this, with the Imprint clearly identified:

https://www.amazon.com/Forgotten-Bon...t%2C213&sr=1-1

Product details
File Size: 3827 KB
Print Length: 298 pages
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer (August 1, 2019)
Publication Date: August 1, 2019
Sold by: Amazon Digital Services LLC
Language: English
ASIN: B07KF46YBG
Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray: Enabled
Word Wise: Enabled
Lending: Not Enabled
Screen Reader: Supported
Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #20 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
#1 in Paranormal Suspense
#1 in Ghost Mysteries
#1 in Ghost Thrillers

That is much like the listing for other tradpubs.

Like, for BAEN's RIVER OF NIGHT:

Product details
File Size: 2311 KB
Print Length: 417 pages
Simultaneous Device Usage: Unlimited
Publisher: Baen Books; 1 edition (July 2, 2019)
Publication Date: July 2, 2019
Sold by: Amazon Digital Services LLC
Language: English
ASIN: B07TLKGFFR
Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray: Enabled
Word Wise: Enabled
Lending: Enabled
Screen Reader: Supported
Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,764 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
#147 in Science Fiction Adventure
#145 in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction (Books)
#137 in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction (Kindle Store)

Mind you, Tigner's book page is very well laid out.
He put plenty of promotion effort into it to make it look like tradpub. And it looks to have paid off.

There's a lot of line blurring going on these days.

Edit: BAEN for the win yet again: Lending enabled.