Indies on Amazon Kindle Only

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by gmw

I fall under "lazy" (there's more to the story than that, but the result is the same). No mixing or matching, effectively no marketing, and now far too long since I last published something. As a result I don't think I can offer you a statistically significant response. (It took me ages to come up with that phrase, it sort of answers your questions but sounds so much better than the raw numbers. I'm the poster-boy for what happens when you don't do any marketing.) I'll try to do better with my next novels so I can give a more useful answer.

No problem.
BTW, minimal promotion is a strategy, too.
After all, time spent promoting is time not spent writing, whereas one of the best promotional tools is simply writing more and publishing more frequently. Each new book is itself a promotional tool.

If you haven't already, check the BUSINESSMUSINGS columns on branding and trade dress. That is marketing, too, of the fire-n-forget variety.

https://kriswrites.com/category/business-musings/

G'luck!

[gmw]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

No problem.
BTW, minimal promotion is a strategy, too.
After all, time spent promoting is time not spent writing, whereas one of the best promotional tools is simply writing more and publishing more frequently. Each new book is itself a promotional tool.

If you haven't already, check the BUSINESSMUSINGS columns on branding and trade dress. That is marketing, too, of the fire-n-forget variety.

https://kriswrites.com/category/business-musings/

G'luck!

Thanks. Yes, I have visited her blog at various times over the years. It's only recently that I've started reading her fiction.

[BookCat]

I like the way this thread has morphed into a Writer's Corner thread. Far more useful than the way it began.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by BookCat

I like the way this thread has morphed into a Writer's Corner thread. Far more useful than the way it began.

Well, some of us like to know how sausages are made.

[BookCat]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Well, some of us like to know how sausages are made.

This has gone right over my head. Don't understand it.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Well, some of us like to know how sausages are made.

Originally Posted by BookCat

This has gone right over my head. Don't understand it.

Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made. – John Godfrey Saxe

And here are some quotes from Upton Sinclair's The Jungle:

These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together.

"There was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausage; there would come all the way from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was moldy and white.

There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had trampled and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs."

Evidently the American president at the time (Teddy Roosevelt?) thought Sinclair was inventing this stuff but on investigation, it was found that what he wrote was pretty much factual and reality was often worse that he had written. The investigation led to the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made. – John Godfrey Saxe

And here are some quotes from Upton Sinclair's The Jungle:

These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together.

"There was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausage; there would come all the way from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was moldy and white.

There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had trampled and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs."

Evidently the American president at the time (Teddy Roosevelt?) thought Sinclair was inventing this stuff but on investigation, it was found that what he wrote was pretty much factual and reality was often worse that he had written. The investigation led to the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act.

And, on the tradpub sides, stories like this oldie but goodie:

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2011...g-keith-gessen

It's a messy world out there.

[darryl]

You can't expect to have your cake and eat it to. If you are boycotting Amazon don't whinge about not being able to buy their exclusive products. Authors are not going exclusive with Amazon because a gun is held to their heads. It is because they are better off financially by doing so. And even on its exclusive products, Amazon's prices are very good.

Personally I think those boycotting Amazon are acting irrationally, though I do of course respect their right to do so. If you are taking a stand on something you regard as principle, then you must be prepared to accept the consequences. Just stop whinging about those consequences.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by darryl

You can't expect to have your cake and eat it to. If you are boycotting Amazon don't whinge about not being able to buy their exclusive products. Authors are not going exclusive with Amazon because a gun is held to their heads. It is because they are better off financially by doing so. And even on its exclusive products, Amazon's prices are very good.

Personally I think those boycotting Amazon are acting irrationally, though I do of course respect their right to do so. If you are taking a stand on something you regard as principle, then you must be prepared to accept the consequences. Just stop whinging about those consequences.

I would say that authors agree to the exclusive because they think they will be financially better off. There have been many authors who try it and find out that the reality doesn't match the sales pitch. Amazon is modeled on the somewhat predatory business model of Walmart which involves squeezing suppliers as much as possible. In this situation, the authors are the suppliers.

As I've said elsewhere, exclusives have been around for a long time. I see nothing wrong with Amazon tying pimping a book to it being exclusive to Amazon. As long as they don't run into anti-trust issues, they can do as they like. If they squeeze the authors too much, that will just cause another ebook store to jump in. Competition is a good thing.

[BookCat]

DNSB: Thanks. I've never read that book but have heard lots about it. As far as I remember, Upton Sinclair wrote it intending to show the appalling working conditions in the meat industry, but instead readers were appalled by the meat production.
I think one reason I've never read it is that I've been vegetarian for nearly 40 years and find the subject repulsive.

[darryl]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

I would say that authors agree to the exclusive because they think they will be financially better off. There have been many authors who try it and find out that the reality doesn't match the sales pitch. Amazon is modeled on the somewhat predatory business model of Walmart which involves squeezing suppliers as much as possible. In this situation, the authors are the suppliers.

As I've said elsewhere, exclusives have been around for a long time. I see nothing wrong with Amazon tying pimping a book to it being exclusive to Amazon. As long as they don't run into anti-trust issues, they can do as they like. If they squeeze the authors too much, that will just cause another ebook store to jump in. Competition is a good thing.

I agree with much of what you have written above. However, I don't think your Walmart comparison holds up particularly well with KDP (with a 70% royalty rate) or even with KU (where Amazon completely controls the size of the pool and any bonuses). Big 5 businesses practices are far more exploitative and getting worse. So far as anti-trust intervention is concerned I consider it unlikely in present circumstances.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by darryl

I agree with much of what you have written above. However, I don't think your Walmart comparison holds up particularly well with KDP (with a 70% royalty rate) or even with KU (where Amazon completely controls the size of the pool and any bonuses). Big 5 businesses practices are far more exploitative and getting worse. So far as anti-trust intervention is concerned I consider it unlikely in present circumstances.

In the US, anti-trust is very much an in the eyes of the prosecutor sort of thing. Certainly, Amazon is much more at risk now than they were under the previous administration. I also expect that exploitative practices is in the eye of the beholder thing as well. Publishing, like the music industry, movie industry and investing in start up companies, tends to be a business where you have to make lots of money on the one that pans out to make up for the 30 ones that didn't pan out.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by darryl

I agree with much of what you have written above. However, I don't think your Walmart comparison holds up particularly well with KDP (with a 70% royalty rate) or even with KU (where Amazon completely controls the size of the pool and any bonuses).

eBook antitrust against Amazon is a non-starter because US antitrust is based on consumer harm and nothing in KDP or KDP Select leads to consumer harm. Amazon doesn't set prices and they don't tie access to the Kindle store to participation in either. In fact, the open nature of the Kindle store has led to some of the acrimony against it from the tradpub establishment, with occasional calls for segregating KDP titles from tradpub titles.

(Here's a fairly recent teapot tempest over the idea: https://www.kboards.com/index.php?PH...memode=mobile;)

So direct consumer harm and tying are both DOA.

Some would try to paint publishers as the customers of KDP and Select and that might work except that both are strictly voluntary contractual agreements, require only 90 day commitments, and exemptions for "duress" are known to be allowed. No much to work with there.

A (marginally) more viable case might be made by distributors like Smashwords or Direct2Digital over Amazon refusing to accept ebooks for sale from them but that too is among the longest of longshots since retailers are generally free to choose which distributors they deal with and Amazon does accept ebooks distributed by Ingram Spark, not just KDP. So no tying there either.

Pretty much every cry of antitrust against Amazon on the publishing side is, so far, just a smokescreen to hide incompetence or disinterest. Amazon seems to have good antitrust counsel they listen to and most of their practices are actually common in modern retail. To the extent that they seem odd in the publishing world is more of a reflection of how retrograde the publishing world is, clinging to practices that made sense in the 1930's (returns, for one) but not in the 2030's. Or even 20-teens...

Where Amazon is crowding the line is in their B2B practices for dry goods retail. The WalMart "squeeze the supplier" cries have some merit but again, the practice is common and not limited to WalMart or Amazon. Every retailer does it to whatever extent their market power allows. Amazon's vulnerability there stems from the possibility that some hanging judge might choose to accept a "relevant market" definition handcrafted to fit Amazon's core market. (This has happened before to others.)

Amazon's best defense against this is to do exactly what they're doing: grow their B&M presence so they can't be judged solely on their online market share but on their share of the total global retail market. They are big fish in the online pond but in the overall ocean of retailing they're still guppies. That is one of the advantages of building a business as a conglomerate: it can grow to enormous sizes by growing horizontally and eating a chunk out of many markets without reaching actionable size in any of them.

And that includes publishing: one thing the anti-Amazon crowd forgets is that on the legal side, publishing is more than just consumer retail. Consumer book publishing isn't even the biggest single segment of the industry, which is why the Penguin/Random House merger sailed through antitrust scrutiny. Sure, they amount to half of all BPH books sold but that doesn't make them particularly powerful in the broader publishing world. The DOJ (and other involved authorities) correctly concluded that being the biggest player in consumer tradpub is just being the biggest fish in a drying pond.

The same applies to Amazon.
US publishing is close to $30B a year and Amazon might sell $4-5B a year. A decent chunk and they might even be the biggest single player but they are far from being a danger under antitrust.

Antitrust isn't an answer to the Amazon question.
In fact, Amazon isn't even the biggest issue for consumer publishing.
But that's a whole different story.

[darryl]

@fjtorres. We tend to hold similar views and this is no exception. The last sentence of my relevant comment was about the unlikelihood of anti-trust intervention. This is basically because, as you say, Amazon actually benefits the consumer. It has been argued in these forums that the minority judgement in the Apple appeal represents the proper interpretation of US anti-trust law. This view would essentially dispense with the need for immediate consumer harm. In fact, it would even disregard immediate and serious consumer harm and even price fixing so long as it was to allow a new entrant to the market. Apparently more players in the market increases competition, even when the price of the entry of more players is the elimination of retail price competition. Some do hold that view and seem to genuinely believe that Amazon is vulnerable in relation to books. Others simply hate Amazon.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by darryl

@fjtorres. We tend to hold similar views and this is no exception. The last sentence of my relevant comment was about the unlikelihood of anti-trust intervention. This is basically because, as you say, Amazon actually benefits the consumer. It has been argued in these forums that the minority judgement in the Apple appeal represents the proper interpretation of US anti-trust law. This view would essentially dispense with the need for immediate consumer harm. In fact, it would even disregard immediate and serious consumer harm and even price fixing so long as it was to allow a new entrant to the market. Apparently more players in the market increases competition, even when the price of the entry of more players is the elimination of retail price competition. Some do hold that view and seem to genuinely believe that Amazon is vulnerable in relation to books. Others simply hate Amazon.

As I've said in the past, there are two competing views on anti-trust law in the US, the Bork approach which looks at consumer harm and the per se approach, which says that certain actions are per se violations, regardless of how it effects consumers. Frankly, the real question is will a prosecutor file charges. The prosecution normally wins in the initial trial when it comes to anti-trust.

Amazon better hope that the Bork approach is the controlling approach since their market share with regards to ebooks makes it likely they would be guilty of a per se violation on any attempt to squeeze suppliers.

My basic point is more along the lines that given Bezos overt dislike for the current administration, Amazon is likely under increased scrutiny from the Justice Dept. My personal feelings is that if you don't like how Amazon does things, don't use them. If you don't like the terms for being an author in KU, then do your own marketing. As long as Amazon doesn't use it's market position to squeeze other ebook stores, then I don't have an issue with them.

I buy a lot of stuff from Amazon, including the vast majority of my ebooks. I have started buying more from Apple's ebook store, but that's more of an experiment than anything else. I don't see it as a binary position where you either hate them or defend them from all criticism as some do here. Amazon has strengths and weaknesses. I try to acknowledge both.