900 Authors Protest Amazon With NYT Ad

[HardOCP News]

More than nine hundred authors spent $104,000 to take out a full page ad urging Amazon to settle its dispute with Hachette Book Group. As far as we know, no one has taken out a full page ad at The Washington Post asking Hachette to give in to Amazon's request for lower priced books. Also, a one day single-page ad at the NYT costs $104k.

Amazon is involved in a commercial dispute with the book publisher Hachette , which owns Little, Brown, Grand Central Publishing, and other familiar imprints. These sorts of disputes happen all the time between companies and they are usually resolved in a corporate back room. But in this case, Amazon has done something unusual. It has directly targeted Hachette's authors in an effort to force their publisher to agree to its terms.

 

[c3141hf]

Basically, Amazon is fighting to lower the costs of eBooks (which are outrageously overpriced) and they are butthurt because someone is finally standing up to the IP Cartel.

 

[Megalith]

Someone needs to fight to get the costs of eComics down, too. $3.99 a comic? Go fuck yourself.

 

[Ducman69]

The biggest problem Amazon has with regards to e-books right now is not pricing, but fake reviews. Its been revealed on numerous occasions now that all the Amazon best sellers were paid reviewers pumping up the reviews and also engaging on various forums to hype them. The fake reviews that I see more and more on Amazon (yes you can sort through them, but they massively impact the total score when glancing at the star rating), totally undermine one of the most powerful tools consumers have at their disposal.

Since the fake reviews are almost entirely all five stars though, and Amazon has found that more numerous and positive reviews lead to higher sales numbers, they REFUSE to take any action to police them unless blatantly called out on it.

In fact, their current system will CENSOR any discussion of either:
1) Fake reviews noticed for a product
2) The seller bribing you to change your review in exchange for free merchandise

They say its not product relevant and has to be removed.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/fake-book-reviews/

 

[heatlesssun]

Basically, Amazon is fighting to lower the costs of eBooks (which are outrageously overpriced) and they are butthurt because someone is finally standing up to the IP Cartel.

The Hachette side is claiming that Amazon is refusing to discount the prices of many of Hachette authors' books so this doesn't make sense.

The first I heard of this dispute was on The Colbert Report, Hachette is his publisher. His way of "attacking" Amazon was to promote a book by a new author, Edan Lepucki called "California" which otherwise probably wouldn't have done as well without The "Colbert Bump".

 

[travanx]

"Refusing to discount the prices of many of Hachette authors' books."

If Hachette doesn't like Amazon business practices, don't sell the books on there?

"Suggesting on some Hachette authors' pages that readers might prefer a book from a non-Hachette author instead."

WTF do they expect? I don't want a search on a store selling everything to only target one company brand.

I can't believe any writer would sign their name to that letter. Amazon isn't blocking anything.

 

[heatlesssun]

"Refusing to discount the prices of many of Hachette authors' books."

If Hachette doesn't like Amazon business practices, don't sell the books on there?

All well and good other than the fact that Amazon is a, if not the, leading distributor of books.

"Suggesting on some Hachette authors' pages that readers might prefer a book from a non-Hachette author instead."

WTF do they expect? I don't want a search on a store selling everything to only target one company brand.

Again all well and good except why do this while not offering discounts for Hachette authors?

I can't believe any writer would sign their name to that letter. Amazon isn't blocking anything.

No one has made the claim that Amazon is blocking Hachette titles but is discriminating against these titles for some reason. The assumption that I'm drawing is that this about some issue of the money split between Hachette and Amazon and Amazon is using its power in the book market to force more favorable terms from Hachette.

 

[travanx]

"As writers--most of us not published by Hachette--we feel strongly that no bookseller should block the sale of books "

All those writers who signed that letter say the word block.

And why does Amazon have to discount anything? Amazon offers a great service and if you want in play by their rules. If I don't agree with something I stop using it. As an example in my small business I won't work again with certain people. Do I lose money doing this? Yes. But if I don't agree then I go elsewhere.

"It has directly targeted Hachette's authors in an effort to force their publisher to agree to its terms."

Maybe there is more to the situation, but that letter does not describe anything that Amazon is doing wrong. If it is a money split, since they are writers and all, make that point instead of petty little things that no large company is going to budge for.

I am all for Amazon just saying we refuse to carry anything related to Hachette until the dispute is resolved.

 

[heatlesssun]

All those writers who signed that letter say the word block.

My bad, I did miss this language.

And why does Amazon have to discount anything? Amazon offers a great service and if you want in play by their rules. If I don't agree with something I stop using it. As an example in my small business I won't work again with certain people. Do I lose money doing this? Yes. But if I don't agree then I go elsewhere.

But why discount other publishers books and not Hachette's? If Amazon is intentionally not discounting Hachette's as a way to leverage their position as a leading book distributor in order to gain advantage, that's simply not legal.

I am all for Amazon just saying we refuse to carry anything related to Hachette until the dispute is resolved.

Except that it's clearly illegal for a company to use a dominate market position to force another company to bow to the dominate company's demands. That's anti-trust 101 and of all government regulation, anti-trust laws are perhaps the most popular across the political spectrum.

 

[Jagger100]

But why discount other publishers books and not Hachette's? If Amazon is intentionally not discounting Hachette's as a way to leverage their position as a leading book distributor in order to gain advantage, that's simply not legal.

They are not a public service they don't have to do anything. The problem is that Hachette has refused Amazon's latest terms, they essentially have no contract and are in a tiff to boot. Hachette doesn't have to supply Amazon with titles. Amazon doesn't have to discount them or observe any pricing desires of Hachette.



Except that it's clearly illegal for a company to use a dominate market position to force another company to bow to the dominate company's demands. That's anti-trust 101 and of all government regulation, anti-trust laws are perhaps the most popular across the political spectrum.[/QUOTE]Actually Anti-Trust is pointed toward harm to the Consumer. Amazon wants to pass along better prices or terms to its consumers. Hachette wants prices to stay high and/or wants to limit customer use of material.

Also, there are other online retailers. Amazon isn't forcing any exclusivity agreement on Hachette. Amazon isn't interfering with the public's access to those retailers. The only source of Amazon's dominance is public preference.

 

[Spidey329]

Wait .. $104k for one page in a newspaper? That's like $1000 per subscriber!

 

[travanx]

But why discount other publishers books and not Hachette's? If Amazon is intentionally not discounting Hachette's as a way to leverage their position as a leading book distributor in order to gain advantage, that's simply not legal./QUOTE]

Good question. But my reasoning is more why do they have to do anything. Its Amazon's store. They make the terms. If they need another company they will bend, if they don't they probably won't bend.

As to Amazon having to carry everything because they are the dominant online seller, that doesn't make any sense. Why can't Amazon just cherry pick what they want?

Of course from the pure money point of view, it would make sense to sell as much stuff as possible at the right price point, so there must be more to the story. I am still only going by that letter. I remember reading more about this previously and was on the publisher's side. But again this letter makes me side with Amazon.

And last, can you not instantly buy a Hachette e-book and have it right then and there? Is that more expensive to do than buying directly from the publisher?

 

[sfsuphysics]

I'll jump in there with the YIKES! $104k for a one day ad? No wonder the newspaper is an dying medium

 

[Kueller]

Except that it's clearly illegal for a company to use a dominate market position to force another company to bow to the dominate company's demands. That's anti-trust 101 and of all government regulation, anti-trust laws are perhaps the most popular across the political spectrum.

(to) Dominate: Verb
Dominant: Adjective
Not interchangeable.

 

[Angry_Games]

Forgive me if this goes long, but it seems I'll be the only one in this thread who actually has first-hand knowledge of what is going on.

I'm a self-published author at Amazon (and iTunes, Barnes & Noble, Google Play, Kobo, Smashwords, Diesel, Scribd, etc.). I received this email from KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) last night, as did all authors who publish through KDP (this does not include Amazon's own publishing arms, and as far as I know, does not include authors whose books are published through one of the Big-5 pubs, or through some of the larger independent publishers, however, a lot of us self-pubs have our own 'publishing' company, and it is done more for tax and legal reasons instead of trying to fool readers. I'll get to that in a minute).

And as a disclaimer, I'm a nobody author who is making a living at it. I'm one of thousands of authors who are now making a living as published authors (by self-publishing). Hachette and wealthy authors like James Patterson and Stephen King have gotten a lot of media attention since this whole dispute started. The problem is, they are only interested in telling "their" side of the story, which is par for the course in any public dispute. I don't fault Hachette or their authors for telling their side and the media not bothering to give the other side (Amazon, self-published authors, JA Konrath & Barry Eisler, and more) a chance to counter any arguments. Or, as is the case most of the time, The Hachette execs or authors get 98% of the story, and the journalist mentions at the end that there's some group of self-published and indie authors who are doing something or other.

Let's talk about what this dispute is about, because in this thread, and many others, I see a lot of people who are not authors or publishing execs making statements and assumptions when they have no real clue what is going on beyond what they "heard" or "read" somewhere.

1. Amazon and Hachette are negotiating a new contract.
1a. Hachette's contract ran out in January.
1b. Hachette has admitted to delaying their negotiations as long as possible. There's a reason for this. You see, Hachette, along with the other Big 5 (then it was Big 6) publishing houses, along with Apple, were sued by the DoJ for illegal price fixing and collusion.

The Big 5, after the evidence was presented (and don't take my word for it, go read the trial transcripts... you will be absolutely amazed at the level of incompetence, not to mention the brazen, bold, open collusion within electronic communications, and the vaunted Steve Jobs was the big name on the list before he died. There's a whole backstory here about how the Big 5 tried to bully Apple the same way they did Amazon. Instead of Apple saying no and turning them in to the DoJ for using their power as a cartel to fix prices, Apple decided to negotiate with them to force agency pricing on Amazon.

Now, if you really want to get deep, you can go read about what Agency Pricing is. The important thing to keep in mind during this whole negotiation is that Apple was found guilty of collusion to fix prices with the publishers. The reason the publishers settled out of court was so they could play the "we didn't have to admit guilt" card, not to mention the five publishers combined don't have the financial might that Apple does.

Apple's legal and financial prowess did not help them at all. Because the evidence against them was that overwhelming. So overwhelming, in fact, that Judge Cote wrote a massive brief, essentially closing every single potential appeal loophole. To this day, Apple has still not been able to successfully appeal this decision.

Again, this is important to the overall story.

Part of the settlement with the DoJ was that the publishers would have to negotiate with Amazon on a staggered timeline (so they could not get together once again and do something illegal).

Complicating the negotiations, Judge Denise Cote's September 2013 final order in the Apple case extended the amount of time during which Apple must retain unlimited discounting power of consumer e-book prices, and, to guard against future collusion, staggered Apple's first post-order publisher negotiations into exclusive six-month windows for each publisher. Under the terms of the order, Hachette is to be the first to be free to renegotiate a straight agency deal with Apple, 24 months after the "Effective Date" of the final judgment—which would be around mid October, 2015. That order gave Amazon leverage: in individual publisher negotiations, Amazon is surely insisting that its e-book contracts give it at least the same power to discount e-book titles as its competitor Apple has, per its court order, even though Apple has said it won't be a price-discounter.

Still with me so far? I guess it isn't as simple as reading a story on HuffPost and believing everything it says. This is just the tip.

As said at the beginning, Hachette's contract ran out with Amazon in January. This is the actual, factual effect of these negotiations so far:

1. Hachette authors' books are still available at Amazon for sale. Period. There is not a single Hachette author that has had his or her books removed/blacklisted by Amazon. Zero. This is a factual statement that can be verified by simply going to Amazon and looking up Hachette authors / books.

2. Amazon, because they are without a contractual agreement with Hachette, still lists Hachette's print books and ebooks. However, since print books require purchase orders and warehouse space, Amazon is unwilling to risk bulk book purchases from Hachette, as there is a chance that no contract will be negotiated, and Hachette will remove their titles from Amazon. It wouldn't be a good business decision for Amazon. Whether you agree that this is a shallow reason or not, it is inarguable that it is not a legit reason. Ebooks are unaffected, since they do not require manufacturing, and cost less than a cent to store and serve.

3. As a way to get Hachette to actually show up to the negotiating table (in March, three months after the contract expired), Amazon decided to remove the "pre-order" buttons from Hachette author pages. Many Hachette authors and publishing execs tried to claim this was financially hurting/ruining authors.

This is a lie. The pre-order button does not affect the sales of a book by not being there. Readers will buy a book regardless of whether they can pre-order it, or have to wait for its release. I've never heard of a reader who refused to buy a book (or video game, or music album, or DVD) because a pre-order button wasn't available months before the product was released. The reality of this situation is that Hachette authors are on a level playing field with indie and self-published authors (we do not get pre-order buttons). That's it. If customers cannot buy a product that is not released and available for immediate sale/consumption, no one is losing money.

Before anyone says that authors could be getting that pre-order money to help them write the book... please go google about how publishing works, and how author contracts are written. I've repeated this twice, because inevitably someone always says something nonsensical without having any idea of how the industry (and the accounting within the industry) works.

Traditionally published authors are paid twice per year. This includes royalties from ebooks and print books. To put this in perspective, self-published authors like me receive monthly payments from iTunes, Kobo, B&N, Amazon, 30 days after the end of a sales period (a calendar month in this case). Trad-pubbed authors are paid an advance, say $10,000 for an example. The author does not earn single dime in royalties until after this $10,000 advanced is 'earned out.' And this isn't $10,000 in sales. This is $10,000 of author royalties at the contract rate, which is right around 12.5% of discounted list price of a book. So, if an author earns $1.00 in royalties for every book sold, he will have to have earned $10,000 in royalties before he will receive any more royalty payments.

$10,000 is on the higher end of the average advance that authors are paid. $5k-10k is the norm. 98% of all traditionally published authors are not mega-bestsellers like Patterson, King, Rowling, etc. 98% of traditionally published authors are considered "midlist." It sounds insulting, but it's really just another way to say "an author who isn't Patterson, King, Rowling, etc." Midlist authors rarely make enough to earn a decent living (google to see how many have had to work at a 'real job' to make ends meet because even though they have a publishing contract, it doesn't mean they are making any money at it).

But what about those $100,000 advances that we always hear about when an author is picked up and given a 3-book contract? That's easy. Break it down. Publishing contracts have non-compete clauses, and they stagger releases so that one book does not cannibalize sales of another (again, google these things, publishing execs say this openly, as well as this information is listen in the investor statements / conference call transcripts). So an author typically gets one book per year published. That's three years for three books, which is $33,333/year. Now, take out 15% of that for an author's agent, and now you're looking at $85,000 broken down over three years (about $27k per year).

Add in self-employment taxes, a hefty 15.3% for withholding alone, and you can see where this is going. That $100,000 advance is now more like $21,500/year. Of course, this is assuming the books do not earn out their advance. And again, publishers willingly admit that most books do not earn out their advances. And again, if this sounds like the dumbest thing a business person could say, you really should read the trial transcripts (plenty of sites have broken it down into easy to digest chunks), as well as some of the things they say publicly to the media.

Anyway, what does this have to do with Hachette vs Amazon's negotiation? The point of #3 was to alert you to the fact that removing pre-order buttons from Hachette author pages at Amazon is NOT hurting those authors. By way of logic, not having pre-order buttons in no way signifies that author's book being de-listed or blacklisted by Amazon. All Hachette books are still available to order.

4. Amazon will still sell you Hachette print books. But because Amazon does not have a contract in place with Hachette, Amazon is not stocking Hachette books in Amazon warehouses. So when you order a print book from a Hachette author at Amazon, Amazon places an order with Hachette. Hachette then has to fill that order, either by sending the book to Amazon so Amazon can then forward it to the customer, or by sending the book directly to the customer.

Hachette books are still for sale. Period. They are still ranked properly based on sales numbers. Period. Amazon simply isn't stocking physical books from Hachette as a way to force Hachette to actually sit down and negotiate.

I'll probably hit post and let this go as I can't rememeber how many characters a post can have. I'll continue in another post.

 

[Angry_Games]

Continued from previous post...

Okay, so are you still with me? Like I said, this isn't a simple "Amazon should do X" or "Hachette should do Y" The real world is never that simple.

Now, where were we? Right. So it's now August, and Hachette has delayed negotiating as long as possible. They actually have made an effort, but that effort was only to demand a return to agency pricing, which will remove Amazon's ability to discount, which is in direct violation of Judge Cote's order. Speculation is that Hachette is waiting until October, when S&S (Simon & Schuster) can begin to negotiate. The speculation is that Hachette believes it will be bolstered by another Big 5 pub demanding a return to agency pricing.

Now let's talk about these 900 authors. Nine hundred authors, and not all of them (not even half from what we can tell) are Hachette authors. Lots of big names like Patterson, Douglas Preston, King, etc. But what gets ignored is that Hugh Howey (author of "Wool" and a very popular self-published author), with Konrath and Eisler's help, created their own "letter" at Change.org. As of this posting, it has right around 8,000 signatures from authors and readers.

Before anyone denigrates the petition being at Change.org, like "anyone can get 10k idiots to sign a petition", keep in mind that the Author's Guild got 900 people to sign their own petition. Think about that before you try to say that 8,000 signing a petition that directly counters the 900 is not important. To say otherwise is to completely and blatantly ignore the fact that 8,000 is more than 900, no matter how you slice it.

Amazon is a business. They have every right to negotiate contract terms friendly toward their bottom line. Or have we forgotten how Wal-Mart works? Wal-Mart sets prices with their partners.

Also, where was the outrage when Barnes & Noble stopped stocking some Simon & Schuster titles last year during their contract negotiations?

A standoff over financial terms has prompted the bookstore chain Barnes & Noble to cut back substantially on the number of titles it orders from the publishing house Simon & Schuster, raising fears among other publishers, agents and authors that the conflict may harm the publishing industry as a whole.

Industry executives, as well as authors of recently published Simon & Schuster books and their agents, say that Barnes & Noble has reduced book orders greatly, to almost nothing in the case of some lesser-known writers. They contend that the move is damaging their sales. Authors say the retail chain has taken other steps, like not giving them display space or allowing book tour appearances in its stores.

Negotiations between two corporate entities are nothing new.However, traditional publishing has been throwing as much ignorance as it can muster towards media outlets to try and sway public opinion.

James Patterson:

Patterson said he believes "the future of our literature is in danger."

"Amazon wants to control book buying, book selling and even book publishing," Patterson said, adding that the company "sounds like the beginning of a monopoly."

And here's a proper response to Patterson's fail by Joe Konrath (a champion of self-publishing, a guy who spent a decade as a trad-pub author, then made more in 18 months as a self-pub author from Amazon sales than he did in the previous decade).

Then there's the NY Times piece that has blown up in their faces.

Honestly, there are so many ridiculous, false, ignorant statements made by publishing execs and the wealthiest authors (who do not speak for the majority who are struggling) that you can just read Konrath's blog for a while. Remember, you already know Hachette's side from all the coverage (or you wouldn't be commenting in this or other threads about this subject). Pay attention to not just Konrath's posts, but to the actual authors commenting on the posts.

While I've got you here, let's talk about why more and more authors are choosing self-publishing these days. Also, before we talk about this, please refrain from making blanket statements about how "all self-pub books are trash/unreadable/written in crayon" because that's just dumb. If that statement was true, Hugh Howey, Elle Casey, Barry Eisler, HM Ward, Amanda Hocking, and a ton of others wouldn't be making one hundred thousand to over one million dollars per year.

Yes, there is some bad self-pub out there. The majority of self-pub, however, utilizes editors and cover artists and ebook/print formatting services to produce a professional, quality product. You need to understand that your opinion of whether a plot is good or bad, or if characters were well-developed, or dialog was stilted and unrealistic... that's simply opinion. If you cannot find grammar, spelling, punctuation, or formatting errors, then it is a professionally produced product, the same as traditionally published books. If you don't believe me, I challenge you to read any trad-pub book, and tell me there isn't at least one error in it somewhere. I have three huge bookshelves full of paperbacks, and every single one of them has either a misused/misspelled word, a missing punctuation mark, or a broken grammar rule.

Self-pubs... we want readers to take a chance on our books, so we use good editors (most of my editors are freelancers from traditional publishing), and we use professional cover artists, either making covers by blending stock photos together (inexpensive), or by hiring illustrators/painters to make custom pieces for covers (I've done this for one book, and in the process of having a second cover drawn). This doesn't mean our stories are any good, but it does mean that the cover and the editing are equal if not better than trad-pub books.

And, need I remind you about the following "literary masterpieces" that trad-pub markets the heck out of you so everyone will buy?
Twilight
50 Shades of Gray
Snookie
The DaVinci Code (which, by the way, I really liked, but not because it was a literary masterpiece, but because it was a fun read that kept me engaged)

So let's stop using blanket statements claiming all self-pub, or even a majority of self-pub, is trash. I'd bet a lot of money that if I looked at your Kindle, you might have tried maybe one or two, found something awful, and decided that forever after you'd always believe self-pub is equal to excrement.

But that's not even as important as WHY we self-publish. Here's the important parts, and if you want depth or expansion, read Konrath's blog. It's all there.

Traditionally Published Author (TPA): signs the rights to his work away to publishers for the rest of his life + 70 years.
Me: I own the rights to ALL of my Intellectual Property. I will own it until I die, and I will pass it on to my heirs so they can make money from my hard work.

TPA: averages 12.5% of discounted list price of a book. Top-end authors might get as much as 25% on ebook royalties, but rarely that high in print.
Me: I earn 70% of the list price of my books. If a book sells for $4.99, I earn $3.50. Compare that with the $.60-ish that TPA's earn (and that's before the 15% agent commission)

TPA: Yep, they pay agents 10-15% of everything. Mostly 15%.
Me: I don't have an agent. I pay an attorney who specializes in IP and publishing contracts. I pay him a flat fee instead of paying him 15% of my book's earnings for the rest of my life + 70 years, just like I would a publisher.

I don't need an agent because I don't plan on submitting my manuscripts to traditional publishers. I don't need to. I'm making a living, enough that I get to do this full-time. I'm not a rich trust-fund baby. Some of you might remember me as the DFI guy from many years ago. I'm just a normal person. A lot of people hate me, a lot of people do not hate me. But I do well enough at writing fiction that I don't have to do anything else. I'm not a best seller, not a millionaire, not even cracked $100,000/year yet. But I pay bills, the most important one being the mortgage, from my earnings.

TPA: publishing houses get the final say when it comes to content editing for a story. Unless you are King, Patterson, a big name who sells hundreds of thousands of books. If you aren't one of these elite authors, you don't really get to argue with your editors if they are adamant about changing something in your story.
Me: I pay editors out of my own pocket. They work for me. Their job is to fix my mistakes without changing the tone of my story.

TPA: publishing houses get to decide what the cover of your book gets. If your book is about alien invasion and the cover is a dog crapping in a park, that's what you get.
Me: As mentioned, I pay cover artists to design covers that I want. Sometimes I pay them a lot of money to custom-paint me a cover.

TPA: gets paid twice per year, once "funky" accounting is done to determine how many physical book returns bookstores had. Google up what a royalty & return report looks like and see if you think anyone but an accountant for a book publisher would understand it intimately (and as an author who self-publishes, I am also a publisher. As a publisher, I want to maximize my earnings, and I want to know details about my sales numbers. Successful authors become proficient at the business side of writing just as much as they hone their actual story crafting.
Me: I get paid once per month. I also get real-time sales data 24/7.

TPA: If the author writes urban fantasy, there's a non-compete clause in her contract that says she's not allowed to publish another urban fantasy story without the publisher's first-right of submission. Meaning, publishers believe if I write an alien invasion book and they publish it, then I write another, different, alien invasion story, the new book will compete and cannibalize sales of the book they published. This is foolish of course, as readers who enjoy an author want MORE form that author, not less.
Me: What's a non-compete clause? I haven't signed one since... wait, I've never signed one. Because I'm not singing my rights over to a publisher who makes silly demands like I don't write books in the same genre or same theme that might compete with what they've published of mine.

TPA: Rights reversions. There's always a rights reversion clause (unless an author is completely stupid). These usually have a minimum threshold of sales that must be met or the copyright returns to the author. This can (and usually is) something like "300 books in a calendar year."

Meaning, if at the end of a year, I haven't sold 300 units of a single title, then the rights to that title automatically revert to me. But that's assuming the publisher doesn't just buy up the 173 copies necessary to meet the threshold, just to retain the rights for another 7-10 years (the length of the reversion clause). Go ahead and google horror stories of authors having to hire attorneys to get the rights to their books back, and how sometimes publishers will buy up copies to meet a threshold.

Let's face it, publishers are nothing more than gamblers. They, like music publishers, are smart (but evil) in that they want to hold the rights to IP as long as possible. Who knows if a book might become extremely popular twelve years after initial publication? Or twelve years after the author's death. What if they allow a book to revert back to its author, then the author hits it big? I shouldn't need to explain how this sort of thing works. And if it seems too obvious, well, it is. Again, refer to the evidence presented at the DoJ vs Apple trial.

TPA: has no control over pricing, promotion, anything.
Me: I can make my books $.99 for an entire weekend whenever I want. I can raise the prices up to $23.99 if I want. I can pay BookBub or ENT or any of a number of book promo sites to advertise my stories and generate sales. It's a bit more work, but I'm getting 70%, so it's well worth it for me.

If you don't believe these unconscionable, draconian terms are within 99.99% of all publishing contracts, go read some publishing contracts. I've seen plenty. I've met a lot of authors who have done everything possible to get out from under a publisher and begin self-publishing.

Even *gasp* Stephen King has self-published. Plus there's Lawrence Block, and many, many more.

Self-publishing is a threat to legacy publishing. If authors realize they can get better terms by selling direct to customers via Amazon, iTunes, etc, then they won't submit to legacy publishers, and legacy publishers will have a harder time finding the next big author (or signing a hot new author). Many of us have realized this.

Most of us (those of us with a brain, anyway), do not believe Amazon is this big, benevolent, caring company. We're not stupid, and we're not blind, no matter how well we've done through Amazon. You probably don't even know that if it wasn't for Apple, Amazon would still be paying 35% to authors. Apple moved to pay 70% to authors selling direct through iTunes, and Amazon had to match it or face potential drain on their author pool, which would have harmed their Kindle sales.

Amazon is a publicly traded company, and that means profits are important. It also means they do stuff that isn't moral or ethical or even legal. But as a Prime customer, and as an author who is making a living using their publishing platform, they're more important to me and my family than Hachette is.

The ONLY reason I'm even in this 'battle' is because of my fellow authors who are stuck in trad pub contracts, I'd LOVE to be published by a legacy publishing house. But I, like thousands of others, would never even dream of signing a contract that gave up the rights to my IP, no control over editing, and the inability to quickly publish more stories (in a series/serial, for example) than on per year, and I can write fifty alien first contact stories if I want.

Right. So. Remember before you comment on a complex subject like this that you probably have no real clue what is actually going on, which makes you look foolish by saying anything.

The biggest problem Amazon has with regards to e-books right now is not pricing, but fake reviews. Its been revealed on numerous occasions now that all the Amazon best sellers were paid reviewers pumping up the reviews and also engaging on various forums to hype them. The fake reviews that I see more and more on Amazon (yes you can sort through them, but they massively impact the total score when glancing at the star rating), totally undermine one of the most powerful tools consumers have at their disposal.

Since the fake reviews are almost entirely all five stars though, and Amazon has found that more numerous and positive reviews lead to higher sales numbers, they REFUSE to take any action to police them unless blatantly called out on it.

In fact, their current system will CENSOR any discussion of either:
1) Fake reviews noticed for a product
2) The seller bribing you to change your review in exchange for free merchandise

They say its not product relevant and has to be removed.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/fake-book-reviews/

There's so much wrong with this statement. If you want, I can break it down point by point. Or you can admit you are portraying your opinion of something as the one true correct factual statement. I deal with reviews every day at Amazon. I deal with Amazon daily, and not just as a customer buying motor oil and guitar strings.

Basically, Amazon is fighting to lower the costs of eBooks (which are outrageously overpriced) and they are butthurt because someone is finally standing up to the IP Cartel.

Correct. Here's the entire gist of the dispute in a nutshell:

Legacy publishers force staggered release of formats on purpose. If a top-tier author gets a hardcover book, then the paperback typically cannot be released for one year, as publishers believe paperbacks will eat into the sales of hardcovers. This is stupid (and it's not true at all).

But it leads to why ebooks are $14.99 and the paperback is $14.99 from trad pubs.

Legacy publishing, aka Traditional Publishing, is still mired in the old way of producing books. Print is still very, very huge for legacy publishing. They've invested a ton of money over the decades for equipment that is now pretty much obsolete (even Amazon can produce quality print books through POD printing). It's very frightening for them to think print sales are going to eventually be surpassed by digital (it will happen, just like it did with music).

Because print is still so important to them, they want to make sure an ebook at $4.99 won't eat into the sales of paperbacks at $14.99. Even though at $4.99, they're likely to sell 6x to 10x the number of copies. That number drops to 1.74:1 when it's $9.99:$14.99, but it is still a significant difference.

Imagine big publishing as the mafia bosses in NYC. Each family controls a different area of the city, and they all collude and fix prices to keep their organization in control and on top.

 

[teh_chem]

Continued from previous post...

Okay, so are you still with me?

Thanks for writing all of this--I found it very interesting and a good explanation.

One thing I'm still unclear of, perhaps you mentioned it and I missed it, is that some of the recent negotiation rumors are that Amazon has been asking for a take of 50% of purchase price books if Hachette is not willing to change the price of e-books and be independent of hardcopies; and for e-books to be lowered to $9.99. At which point, Amazon will stay with the previous 30% take (my curiosity makes me want to think that e-book sales would increase a lot if the price were reduced to $9.99 from 12.99 or 14.99). Is this just the 'public justification' for the negotiation stalls, or is this really the main point?

This old-school publishing model is so antiquated. As people have mentioned, the other media industries have adjusted--maybe video media not as fast as audio media. I'm content to pay money for quality media,and I actually don't like having physical media all over the place. But other than stubborn refusal to dare tempt a perceptual loss of inherent value by publishers, I don't see any reason why e-pubs and hardcopy books SHOULD be priced the same. The publisher model is old, broken, and unnecessary at this point. You don't need the large might for e-pub. You don't need the huge capital and resources to physically print, bind, ship, store, and market that you do for physical media, so there's no logical reason why electronic and physical media should be priced the sae (and even then, I think the prices of physical media are a bit absurd as well, but that's for the consumers to decide with their wallets).

 

[Thuleman]

How can ebooks even sell for $9.99 when games take much more time and money to develop and they end up at $5 on Steam?!

Cry me a river traditional publishers, fuck you, fuck you very much!

+1 for self-publishing, at least then you reap most of the rewards and don't pay into the bloated and antiquated traditional publishing model.

 

[Jagger100]

old-media trying to control new media. Probably an underlying politic aspect as the old media in this case is likely controlled by "correct thinking" people while Amazon represents a distribution model which could allow writers unfiltered access to the public.

 

[Exavior]

How can ebooks even sell for $9.99 when games take much more time and money to develop and they end up at $5 on Steam?!

Cry me a river traditional publishers, fuck you, fuck you very much!

+1 for self-publishing, at least then you reap most of the rewards and don't pay into the bloated and antiquated traditional publishing model.

Games don't end up on steam for $5 day one. At least not the ones that take a lot of money to make.

It is going to take them awhile to get to that level. By that point in time a book is probably forgotten about sadly.

 

[mi7chy]

I'm not going to argue with lower cost for consumers. Amazon gets my support.

 

[SGA76]

1. Why can't there be a discount for ebooks? They're not getting printed, they have to get typed out ONCE. You're saving trees, ink and labor.
2. Screw them, don't cut them out, just double or triple their prices so it hurts their business so you can leverage negotiations.
3. Yeah, ecomics should be about $1 a piece, I'd start buying them then. Again, no material cost to print or distribute through stores, less labor to pay, no markup needed.

 

[Ducman69]

Just make e-books free, with advertisements every few pages.