Dear Publishers:
Hiya. You don’t know me, but I’m a pretty good customer of yours. I buy several thousand dollars of books a year, in almost every genre you sell: fiction, non-fiction, fantasy, sci-fi, classics, mysteries, you name it. I have bought everything from Gladwell to the most obscure author in your backlists and back again. I may well be the only heterosexual male in the entire world who spent more on urban fantasy alone than he does on video games, movies, and newspapers combined. I really love books.
For the last decade or so, I’ve bought many of my books through Amazon. Amazon knows me. They know what I like, they send me recommendations via email, and on those rare instances when I have a problem with a book they fix it for me within 24 hours. I really like Amazon.
That is a new experience for me in a book vendor. Typically, bookstores are anonymous entities who happen to be in the same airport, mall, or street as I am when the craving strikes. I have absolutely no loyalty to them. (I hear that before my time there were neighborhood book stores where you’d go in to get a recommendation from someone who knew your tastes intimately. I’ve never been in a neighborhood book store.)
Some months ago, I bought a Kindle. Publishers, if you thought I was a good customer before, you should see me now. I don’t even have to find an anonymous dealer to get my fix — I just punch a button and bam, new book. And punch that button I do — about four times as frequently as I did previously. Amazon now sells me over 90% of the books I buy.
Recently, it has come to my attention that some of you are having a bit of a spat with Amazon, centering over release schedules, pricing issues, and, above all, control. This sent me walking over to my book shelf to check whether those of you who are having the spat with Amazon actually publish authors I read. The fact that I didn’t know this off the top of my head, and that this is the first time I’ve thought about individual publishing companies in my entire life, should be a preview of coming attractions for you as regards to which company I am backing in this fight.
Let me be perfectly clear: I have no price sensitivity with regards to books. I read the books I want to read when I want to read them. I have never bought or avoided buying a book based on whether it was hardcover or trade paperback. (Incidentally, since we’re all businessmen here, let’s be honest: you want to extract as much money out of me as possible because I am price insensitive, and staggering hardcover and paperback release dates is just a way to accomplish that. Neither of us really care about the physical format in the slightest.)
It does not matter to me what you charge for the books on my Kindle. However, I’m hearing things about you windowing Kindle releases — i.e. delaying them so that you can protect your hardcover sales. You think my likely behavior is to go to the bookstore where no one knows my name and pay extra so that I can have the hardcover on release day. Words cannot express how mistaken you are.
I will read books on my Kindle. Whether they are your books or the books of your competitors matters to me not one whit.
Dear Authors:
We’re quite the odd ducks, aren’t we. You don’t know my name either, despite the fact that we’re on surprisingly intimate terms. I spend most of my leisure time rattling around in worlds of your creation.
I understand you feel a bit of connection to the people who liberated you from the slush pile, sign your royalty checks, and respond to your emails. You know their names, after all.
I want to read your books as fast as you can write them, on my Kindle. If you support me in this, I will stick with you like the plucky heroine to the aloof and semi-abusive vampire lord who turned her. (P.S. urban fantasy authors: stake his worthless carcass. Signed, beta males everywhere.)
If, on the other hand, you should support your publishers’ interests over my desire to pay you money, mark me on this: I will buy books from authors willing to sell them to me. I might get a little depressed over not being able to read my favorites, but if you haven’t noticed, I read a lot faster than you can possibly write and that makes me promiscuous by nature. Any regret I feel over losing you will be quickly assuaged by epic heroism, vile betrayal, true love, and other themes of investing advice books.
Dear Book Stores:
Good luck with that coffee thing.
Dear Amazon:
Keep being awesome.
Regards,
Patrick McKenzie
(A man of no particular importance, who bought more books in 2009 than 20 average American households.)
I consider myself a book a holic, too. But I always have a pile of books I didn’t even started to read. To keep it short, do you have some “not rip of speed reading advice”? I don’t care about reading a book quadrillion times faster. I just have the feeling that from time to time I “meet” people who read let’s say twice as fast than I do. And I’m wondering if it’s some kind of thing I don’t get or it just develops over time?
Thanks
Er, no.
What’s going on is not, I think, what you think is going on. It’s all about ownership of the supply chain — and Amazon repeating a bullying tactic that worked for them last year, in the UK, against another customer.
(More here, if you can bear to read it.)
Maybe it’ll work out like that, but there’s another version of the story where all you’re left with to buy are mags and newspapers and e-stuff you bought in 2009. If every major publisher goes with anyone-but-Amazon, then Amazon will change their tune or the Kindle will die. The Kindle experience is great, but the barrier to entry isn’t that high.
I think you’re misreading the publishers, Patrick– I haven’t seen any of them proposing “windowing”, except as a retaliatory move against Amazon. Instead, the main point of disagreement is about the price-point, and your post provides support to the publisher’s position.
Amazon is trying to set a universal $9.99 price point for e-books, similar to iTunes $.99 price point for songs. Macmillan, on the other hand, wants a sliding system with e-books starting out at $12-$15, and gradually dropping in price over time (similar to the current system, whereby the price drops as books move from Hardcover to Trade Paperback to Mass Market paperback to Remainders.)
Michael, you’re factually incorrect. See the letter from Macmillan to its author/agent community:
http://www.publishersmarketplace.com/lunch/macmillan_30jan10.html
Money quote: This past Thursday I [John Sargent, honcho at Macmillan] met with Amazon in Seattle. I gave them our proposal for new terms of sale for e books under the agency model which will become effective in early March. In addition, I told them they could stay with their old terms of sale, but that this would involve extensive and deep windowing of titles.
Whoever “owns” the customer, wins. Amazon third-party merchants learned that long time ago, and learned to play by the rules. I am afraid that publishers will have to learn the same lesson: Amazon will actually do fine without them, and they can’t afford losing Amazon.
Now, where is that “Tweet this” button…
It would be nice to see the publishers squeezed a lot harder, I’m pretty sure they aren’t adding much value to the supply chain. If I was a author I’d be looking for an agent who could handle marketing directly to the reader rather than a publisher selling to Walmart, Amazon or Borders.
Amen.
Did you ever stop to think that the reason you’ve never been in a neighborhood bookstore is because Amazon helped to put them all out of business?
Dear Patrick, here’s a word from an author.
You say, and I quote:
“I want to read your books as fast as you can write them, on my Kindle. If you support me in this, I will stick with you like the plucky heroine to the aloof and semi-abusive vampire lord who turned her.
If, on the other hand, you should support your publishers’ interests over my desire to pay you money, mark me on this: I will buy books from authors willing to sell them to me. ”
Let me point out a few things, as writer to reader.
1) I would love for you to “read my books as fast as I can write them, on the Kindle”. But I don’t write books on the Kindle. I write WORDS. Words need the input of so many other people along the line, I feel as though my books are actually, you know, IMPROVED if they pass through the hands of the editors and the copy editors who make sure the words are the best they could be. I – and no other author you can name – are born geniuses. You want to read ANY book, or you want to read a GOOD book? If the latter, then you have to wait for the wheels to grind… and the grinding wheels kinda need to get paid, along the way. Amazon, however warm and fuzzy your relationship is with them, does not pay these people.
2) What do you mean by “if you support me in this”? Are you actually aware of how publishing works, for those of us published professionally and not by fly-by-night self-pub houses to which WE had to pay money to get our books printed? Are you aware of how little control the author has over their book once it leaves their hands – over what media it’s available in and when, and how much money is to be charged for any of these editions? What do you mean, “if you support me in this”? The authors have no say in ANY of this. At all. Support or not. Lay on the publisher, or lay it on the bookseller, in this instance. The authors had nothing to do with it… except watch their books vanish, and their sales evaporate. So two giants are battling it out, you’re waiting out there tapping your feet because you want your cheap ebooks NOW, and the authors are bleeding to death at your feet. We’d love to make a living. All of us. If you support us in THAT, that would be good, too.
3 “)If, on the other hand, you should support your publishers’ interests over my desire to pay you money, mark me on this: I will buy books from authors willing to sell them to me.” – Once again, with feeling. AUTHORS DO NOT SELL THEIR BOOKS TO YOU. Authors sell their books to their publishers. Publishers (those worth their salt) pay an author an advance against royalties – that is to say, a certain sum of money against a bet on the sales of that book. In theory when the book earns out you start receiving royalties – at the rate of 7 – 10% of the book’s price. Many books NEVER earn out, which means that the advance is all the money that the author will ever see. And in the meantime, let’s be generous and call it 10% – do your math. A hardcover book selling at $24.00 will net an author $2.40. A paperback selling at $6.99 will earn the author seventy cents a book. You’d need to sell a truckload of these to buy yourself a decent meal, never mind make a dent in your advance.
That’s all the money we get from our books. We produce the raw material over which everyone else is squabbling, and our share of the profits of the whole shebang is an order of magnitude lower than anyone else’s in the process.
We’d LOVE to sell you our books. Trouble is, when Amazon pulls an ENTIRE PUBLISHING CATALOGUE FROM THEIR SITE… we can’t. Because you *can’t buy them*.
My books are not Macmillan so they’re currently still available on Amazon, both in dead-tree and Kindle format. So in theory I”m one of the authors “willing to sell to you”. I have no more control over that than a dozen of my friends and colleagues, published, for instance, by Tor which is a Macmillan subdivision, have any control whatsoever over the fact that their books are NOT currently available on Amazon. Believe me, not one of them is remotely unwlilling to sell any reader out there any of their books.
So don’t shoot the authors in the back. Just because you like to pay less for your entertainment doesn’t mean that anyone is directly obliged to provide you with said entertainment at the price which you want to pay for it – but at least know who’s fixing those prices and who’s the one controlling which books you are able to buy at all. And here’s a heads-up: it isn’t, and never was, the authors.
I’ll say here again what I said on another blog post from an irate author whose publisher happens to be, you guessed it, MacMillan.
I think it’s naive to think any of us know exactly what went down, why it went down, and where it’s going.
i also think it’s unfair to lay blame solely at the feet of Amazon when two other players, MacMillan and Apple, both have a rather “forceful” business reputation.
Regardless of what any of us think, Amazon has the right to run their business anyway they want- even in to the ground. (Although I hardly think that’s likely).
They’re all big boys; let them work it out.
Tobias Buckell (author of Crystal Rain and Ragamuffin) has a post which breaks down the cost of producing ebooks and why it is difficult to expect publishers to not have flexible pricing: http://www.tobiasbuckell.com/2010/01/31/why-my-books-are-no-longer-for-sale-via-amazon/
Some of this I knew already, but some of it I had failed to take into account. I too would like to get my books as quickly as possible. I’m a total bookivore. But what the market bears right now and what the return for the publisher and author is at the moment makes Amazon’s price-fixing untenable. If you look at Toby Buckell’s numbers he was getting ebook sales in the three digits.
Patrick,
This quote comes from the same letter as your quote:
“At first release, concurrent with a hardcover, most titles will be priced between $14.99 and $12.99. E books will almost always appear day on date with the physical edition.”
It contradicts the first one (unless you are reading a LOT into the word ‘almost’), and I think it should be given greater weight as it is more specific. Presumably in the first one, windowing was referring to price and not availability.
I second the Buckell link–I was going to give it to you myself until I saw someone else posted it.
I can tell you’re biased by your love of Amazon, and while I admire that you’re loyal, I don’t think loyalty has ever been an intelligent stance in a discussion about business. Work with the facts. Be loyal, by all means, but also realize that Amazon has made some choices that aren’t friendly to non-Amazon customers or to portions of the industry that don’t originate from within Amazon, and that it might be more responsible of Your Favorite Store to behave in a way that allows me to have my own separate Favorite Store, one that doesn’t DRM my material or force me to buy THEIR reader instead of letting me choose my own method.
Most readers don’t spend as much money as you do, and while you might think that spending more than 20 households makes you a more important customer, it actually places you in a smaller segment of the market. I am actually the majority: someone who buys books they’ve been waiting for and books they browse, but doesn’t have the cash to scoop up everything Amazon recommends. Instead, I have to be choosy, and sometimes that means I wait for a hardcover I wanted to come out in paperback so I can afford it. In total, there are more of me than there are of you, and we spend more dollars because we are thousands of households, not twenty. I’m not saying we’re more important–we’re not–but I do think it’s selfish for you to ignore us because you have more money to spend.
I guess it all comes down to being privileged enough to afford what you want when you want, but I don’t find Macmillan’s proposed $14.99 too shabby when it also means I can wait awhile and get something for $5.99. Amazon hasn’t mentioned that anywhere, of course, because the $5.99 price for older books falls below THEIR chosen $9.99. Macmillan isn’t being evil–they’re trying to be flexible. And there ARE books I would pay $14.99 to have right away. If you’re such an avid reader, you should know that feeling. I’d pay $50 for an e-book of Scott Lynch’s Republic of Thieves if I could have it this very second, and forgo the next eight books I would have bought with my book budget because I want that one so badly. :)
I hope you can be open-minded reading Buckell’s post, because it has information you should know.
I’m curious about your loyalty to Amazon: if there were another marketplace of ebooks for your Kindle, would you consider using it as well?
Did all you people talking about loyalty miss the part where he says he’s not loyal to bookstores? Geez.
Yeah, he likes Amazon. He likes them because they get him books, instantly and easily. If someone else comes around and offers him instant, easy access to his drug of choice, then he’s *there*, man.
Patrick, where I think the argument breaks down is that you’re talking about going to another publishers’ offerings if an electronic edition of a book is delayed at release. I don’t see you doing this, as you mentioned yourself you’re not taking a stance on principle but rather convenience. Why wouldn’t you just buy the book when it *does* come out in electronic form, then? It’s not like they’re suggesting that they’ll never offer an electronic version.
In other words, you’re talking about buying whatever’s available electronically, and being publisher agnostic in the process. So if the delaying publisher finally gets that electronic version out, why wouldn’t you end up buying it then? It’s not like you already would have read it; you mentioned you *only* read on the Kindle and of course a book is only available on one publisher.
I agree with you that the process kinda stinks right now, and it’s going to change. But as mentioned before, a given author doesn’t really have a say in this process. And once you start publishing, changing publishers appears to be rare.
Eventually the publishers are just going to be editors, or editors/marketers. Seems like a good opportunity–a small shop that does the editing and essentially SEO for an author, who would be published online only. Of course we’re not there yet, but ebook reading is increasing. But aside from that problem the biggest problem is that authors want big advances. To those of us who write software this seems silly, but I can understand the attraction of someone else shouldering the risk and paying you a lump sum.
Somewhat modified appropriation from the Buckell link mentioned above: http://www.tobiasbuckell.com/2010/01/31/why-my-books-are-no-longer-for-sale-via-amazon/
…professionally published software that looks slick and usable use the services of a number of different people.
What are those costs?
A software producer: the person who works with the developer on the big picture of the software. How are these interfaces tied together? Does this feature make sense? What software should we work on next?
A typesetter: makes the inside of the book look professional and easy to read, well put together
Designer: layout, more look and feel of the software. The look and feel of the website and related marketing and how it incorporates the logo and branding.
Illustration: someone has to paint, create, or put together the graphics that sell the software. May also contribute to design of elements of the software proper.
Internal Tester: this person goes through and makes sure the software is usable and error free, looks for internal consistency (your highlight color is blue here, but brown there. People don’t usually look for “Find” to search, but rather “Search”).
Beta testers: this final pass looks for any final bugs that have slipped through everyone else.
———
So, really, there are *so* many reasons that software developers can’t *possibly* develop quality software without a team of people working for them! I mean, not something people would *pay* for, right?
Look–this isn’t rocket science. It’s not that hard and it’s getting easier. Authors are quite capable of learning this stuff, and outsourcing what they can’t–just like small software vendors (uISVs) have been doing for quite some time. In fact Wikipedia just told me (alas, with no citation) that “hanges to the publishing industry since the 1980s have resulted in nearly all copy editing of book manuscripts being outsourced to freelance copy editors.” So to some degree this is already happening.
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