Amazon v. authors and publishers…
Evidence accrues all the time showing how Amazon, the world’s mega-retailer and biggest online bookstore, is neither an author’s nor a publisher’s friend.
Authors Guild, which is more a representative for Big Five publishers’ and their authors’ interests than a true union for writers, has recently added more logs to that bonfire. They’re alarmed that their author members only made an average of $20K in 2018, down from the previous year. I’m embarrassed to say how much I made (not my main motivation, of course), but their reasons resonate a wee bit with me.
Whether self- (indie-) or traditionally published, if you don’t play by Amazon’s rules, they will bury your books. They reward those who do play by their rules (Mark Dawson, for example), but the rules are prejudicial for both publishers and authors because they support Amazon’s monopolistic policies. Their message to Ms. or Mr. Author: make your books exclusive on Amazon, sell pages worth of your writing for pennies to Prime members, and use our marketing services, and we won’t bury your book. Ms. or Mr. Publisher, pay our commissions and fees and use our marketing services (it’s harder for Amazon to demand exclusivity here), and we won’t bury the books in your catalog.
To be fair, Amazon isn’t the only retailer that buries books. While Smashwords doesn’t overtly promote exclusivity (far from it, because they distribute to affiliated retailers, which Amazon doesn’t do), they also bury books too. And they use the same two criteria to justify it.
Besides the obvious criterion of “popularity” used to determine how deep a book is buried, retailers also use “date of publication.” Relic is Preston and Child’s best Pendergast book; Eye of the Needle is Follett’s best. They’re old, so they’re buried, maybe not as much as books written by less famous authors, but the phenomenon is real. My first book (Full Medical, 2006) is often buried down the list on Smashwords and only jumps up and down a bit on Amazon when a few smart readers recognize it’s as current today as when it was written, if not more so. (New reviews also increase the little jumps, so, please readers, write a review when you read a book, even if it’s “old.”)
Burying books is a policy that’s unfair to readers. It conspires against allowing readers to discover fresh, new voices and their books they might have missed and forces them to buy the “new products” (especially those books just released by the Big Five, which follows the biz model of many bookstores, of course, especially in my tristate area). In other words, it promotes formulaic authors and their books in some weird distortion of an American Idol contest. It has become so bad that I will often flee to my local bookstores or small press catalogs to find new authors and new books and ignore the latest Patterson, Grafton, or Baldacci book.
The book industry has always suffered from this (authors publishing with the Big Five will often see their books disappear from bookstore shelves after a month or two, i.e. they’re more than buried there—“disappeared” is the better word, just like in some autocratic state). But Amazon encourages the practice with their many zero-content reviews and ranking system that creates bandwagon effects that often aren’t at all indicative of quality. (Weir’s The Martian is an example—it’s entertaining sci-fi only if you can get past the pages and pages of lessons of how to grow spuds in human excrement.) In that, Amazon is like a publisher (it wants to be one, of course)—they don’t give a rat’s ass about quality as long as the book sells.
Of course, they say, that’s because publishing is a business—it’s about selling books, don’t you know? But will Amazon destroy this business for both publishers and authors? As time goes on, the answer “yes!” is becoming more and more likely.
What do we do about Amazon? I’m not sure there’s anything a single author or publisher can do. Readers can’t protest via Goodreads—Amazon owns it! (I’ve tried. Group monitors booted me out; they’re willing pawns of Amazon, I guess.) Authors don’t really have a union (Authors Guild isn’t an author’s friend either, as much as they rant against Amazon). Various organizations like Mystery Writers of America and Science and Fantasy Writers never rock the boat because they’re dominated by Big Five authors. (Admittedly they do offer a bit of help, as long as you play by their rules.)
Maybe all readers and writers can do is give book publishing a decent burial when death arrives and go watch NetFlix (not Amazon’s video streaming service, please). Oh, right! They just raised their prices.
I’d love to hear your opinion!
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Comments are always welcome.
The Last Humans. Ex-USN and LA County Sheriff’s Department diver Penny Castro surfaces to find apocalyptic death all around her from a plague that’s been delivered from Asia. (The NY Times just had an article about how we should worry more about the PRNK’s bio-warfare bombs than their nukes.) Can she survive it and protect the adopted family she’s building? You’ll find a pre-release excerpt under the title “Oasis Redux” and archived in the exerpts folder of this blog. Coming soon from Black Opal Books.
Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas (for a while, at least)!
