People are always curious about this, so I thought I’d post it and refer to my previous post about what kind of sales numbers it takes to make a living as a fiction author in the US. Of course, the royalty rates depend on what’s in your contract. Many contracts have sales volume break points. For example, an 8% royalty on the first 50,000 paperbacks sold, 10% on anything above that. But this should give you a good feel.
Amazatzi?Franklin Foer and Scott Turow recently made comments which suggest Amazon is in the process of ushering in a totalitarian book economy.
Is Bezos, as Hitler was in the 1930s, biding his time, playing a long game, one that will lull the masses into a false sense of bookish security? Are we appeasing him, letting him take over the continent bit by bit? Is the blitzkrieg less than a decade away?
If you listened to a recent Intelligence2 debate, you would have heard Foer-Turow claim that, yes, that’s exactly where we are headed. On the other side of the debate were Joe Konrath and Matthew Yglesais, arguing that Amazon is the reader’s friend.
Konrath and Yglesais made some good points. But they left the central Foer-Turow argument standing like a citadel. It was left standing because much of what they had to say, as good as it was, frittered around the edges or went off into beer land.
But the Foer-Turow argument is not a citadel. It’s a house of crackers.
Here’s why: publishers, authors, readers, and entrepreneurs all have brains. And somehow, in their threat assessment, Foer-Turow forgot that.
How could they forget something so fundamental?
Well, their argument went like this.
So Amazon is taking over more and more book territory. When it’s taken over enough territory to be unassailable, it will then proceed to ruin our culture because its model of book selling will suppress quality non-fiction and fiction alike. And then it will gouge readers.
Sounds depressing.
Sounds like Orwell’s 1984 or global warming.
The only problem is that there is a big honking flaw in all of that.
Like BIG and HONKING.
And I’m not talking about the issues like the idea that publisher advances are the only way non-fiction writers can be funded, or that publishers are the only way the vast majority of fiction writers can obtain quality book covers, marketing, and editing. Or that one internet site has the power to put a choke hold on ideas.
No, it’s about something else.
You need to know I’m not an Amazon groupie. Nor am I a hater of publishers. I am a businessman. I’m looking for good partners. And I recently wrote a post pointing out that it’s delusional for authors to think Amazon is their BFF with pinky rings. They are just, at the moment, a great indie partner. But their interests and mine are not perfectly aligned. Our love is definitely not written in the stars.
So I’m not here to stand up for Amazon. I’m here to say that the scenario Foer-Turow paint is fantasy.
Why?
Because they’ve set up a chess board and assumed that Amazon is the only player.
How does a monopoly stay a monopoly?
The government either legislates it. Or the company maintains their position by force. Or they own something that nobody else can get. Or the barriers to entering that market are so high nobody can get in to play. In all these scenarios, if people want the goods, they are forced to interact with the monopolies.
But has the government given Amazon a legal monopoly?
Um, nope. No charters here to be the only fur trappers in the West.
Does Amazon have an army of thugs who are going to beat people up and make them join Amazon Prime?
No. Well, maybe that’s what the drones are for, but they haven’t rolled them out yet.
Do they own something nobody else can get, like a piece of land? Are they sitting on the world’s largest reserves of cheap book oil?
Nope. They’ve got a great website and excellent logistics. But websites really aren’t that hard. And if we’re talking ebooks, you don’t need logistics.
What about the barriers to entry?
The big advantage Amazon has is that they usually have the lowest book prices around, the biggest selection (you can find almost any book you want there in any format it’s available in), and are incredibly convenient, providing samples, reviews, recommendations, and easy checkout. And they have the crowds.
It’s hard to get crowds. It’s hard to get all that content. It’s hard to beat their prices. Those are some dang good barriers that keep new guys out.
And Foer-Turow figured that’s all set. In stone.
But what happens if publishers have brains and are actually headed up by, like, real humans who aren’t just going to roll over and play dead? What would such folks do should Amazon keep killing off more and more of them and stealing their pie?
Amazon doesn’t own the rights to their books. As soon as any contract ends, publishers could simply say, we’re done. Our books will no longer appear in your store. If you’re faced with extinction or something else, what do humans normally do?
Amazon’s advantage is being the everything store. You can find every book imaginable there. So what happens when shoppers go there and can’t find the most popular books of our time? How long do they stick with Amazon when the shelves are empty? Anyone think about why Amazon kept selling Hachette books even when they were having contract disputes?
What happens if indie authors have brains and are real humans who aren’t going to roll over and play dead either? What would such folks do should Amazon keep squeezing more and more profits out of them? Could such folks pull their books (like many bestselling indies have from Kindle Unlimited), form a co-op, and create their own site?
What if everyone was talking about this awesome book that was all the rage, but it wasn’t stocked by Amazon? It was stocked on the indie site, and Apple, and all the others. How would that affect shoppers?
What happens if there are real human entrepreneurs out there or real humans leading other businesses, and they were all wanting to make a buck, and they see Amazon charging readers a ton and swimming in easy dollars? What happens when they see those tempting profits?
Do you think they might offer disgruntled publishers and authors better terms? Do you think they might give better deals to price-gouged readers?
So is Amazon going to kill publishers? Only if the humans have left the building.
Will they kill authors? Only if authors let them.
Will they gouge readers? Not when other folks see there’s money to be made by undercutting them.
Amazon is playing in a global market with the likes of Alibaba, Google, Apple, Walmart, etc. Amazon is playing in an internet economy where college students can come up with an idea and become billionaires. Equally important, Amazon owns nothing that somebody else can’t recreate. They have no legal monopoly. They have no army of thugs. What they have is a lot of content, a well-known URL, logistics for the hard copies, and good prices.
But what they do not have is a marketplace where everyone else involved is absent a brain.
Here’s Joseph Finder, a NY Times best-selling author, talking about how he studied his craft, why he uses outlines, and what he decided about four-letter words and why.
I had the same reaction when my daughter came to me wanting to read my stuff. I’ve never heard of Joseph Finder–there are soooo many authors these days. But I can tell you I’m going to pick up one of his books to see what he’s all about.
Dear But-All-Writers-Are-Rich,
Jim C. Hines is a hard working midlist author with a couple of fun series out. Hines reveals what he makes in his post 2011 Writing Income. More importantly he reveals what he’s been making for a few years. For more information on advances etc., please peruse my page on Writing Business Facts & Figures.
Sincerely,
The Man
First of all, if I could look like Stephen R. Covey does in that picture, I would shave my head and never look back. Holy moly, I love that picture. But that’s not why I’m writing.
James Maxey is a writer who I respect and whose comments on the boards of Codex Writers often make me think or laugh. He recently started a thread about writing mission statements.
Ack!
I groaned when I first read the title of his topic. I know first-hand how useful goals are. I know how vital it is to identify what’s vital in any endeavor. Heck, I’m a Covey-lover through and through.
But every mission statement I’ve seen has either been useless corporate toilet paper (because they’re printed on stuff that’s too stiff and rigid to be of any help in the bathroom) or it’s a personal artifact that has a six week half life, after which it turns into something like that singing fish you bought and can’t for the life of you figure out why or where to put it now that you realize you could have eaten a steak for just as much money and the pleasure would have lasted longer.
And yet consciously thinking about how you want to live is so powerful. I think the corporate world ruined the term for me. I cannot bring myself to write a “mission statement.” I know what I want to do in my various roles in life. I know how I want to live. But I cannot use that label. Alas.
So here’s my “what I want to do” as far as writing is concerned. It’s not crisp and clean. And if I had to write it again, it would come out differently. But it has the gist.
—-
I want to make people fall in love like I did when I first watched the Sound of Music–that sweet, pure yearning. And when they’re out of love, I want them to see a way back.
Every once in a while I want the ground to shift under the feet of my readers like it shifted under mine when I first watched Les Miserables with Anthony Perkin.
I want them to laugh.
I want to give them the wonder and adventure that was given me when I read the Hobbit.
I want them, at least once, to shout in triumph.
I want to share my delight in people who are fascinating, flawed, salt-of-the-earth, odd, funny, strong or a hundred other wonderful things, but who show some courage, a little or a lot.
I want readers to weep at the hope of redemption. I want them to despair at loss.
I want the sun to shine. I want the world to crack.
And when my readers are done, when the book’s closed and they sit back, I want the story and people to linger, I want my readers to want to go back. I want them to feel it was, not only a surge of living, but a good thing to have once been lost in the pages of my book.
I have found every one of Maya’s practical prescriptions to work for me.
Had a wonderful time teaching about how to create page-turners. Here’s a PDF of the PowerPoint as promised.
