Amazon fails again (more about the Macmillan flap)

I was going to comment more extensively about the Macmillan flap, specifically about Amazon's "ham-fisted" (their word) tactics, but the price of ebooks is much more interesting to me at the moment. I will mention, briefly, that Amazon retaliated against Macmillan by delisting from their site every title published by Macmillan and Macmillan's imprints, approximately one-sixth of Amazon's inventory. Not just ebooks. ALL their books.

Did it hurt Macmillan? A little bit. Did it hurt Amazon? Plenty. Did it hurt Macmillan's authors? Yes, a great deal.

Here's an excellent (and quite funny) blog post on how Amazon managed to totally piss off authors and their readers once again.

Amazon pisses off their customers

Here's a short quote from that post, to get you started:

Note to Amazon: Real people do not give a shit about your fight with Macmillan. Real people want to buy things. When your store takes them to a product page on which they cannot buy the thing on the page, they will not say to themselves, “Hmm, I wonder if Amazon is having a behind-the-scenes struggle with the publisher of this title, of which this is the fallout. I shall sympathize with them in this byzantine struggle of corporate titans.” What they will say is “why can’t I buy this fucking book?”

Macmillan and Amazon: more about the price of ebooks

There's a new dust-up over the price of ebooks, and it could be very good news for small, independent publishers, although not such good news for consumers.

The short version is that Macmillan, one of the 'big six' traditional publishers, wants Amazon to price their ebooks using an "agency model." That means that Macmillan sets the price the book sells for on Amazon, and Amazon gets 30%, with 70% going to the publisher. Under the existing model, Amazon pays Macmillan 50% of the retail price, but Amazon is free to sell the book for whatever price they want.

Amazon charges $9.99 for most best-sellers in order to promote their Kindle, and they take a loss on most of those books. Macmillan wants the ebook price to be closer to $15. They say that if Amazon won't adopt an agency model, they will delay the publication of the ebook by seven months after the publication of the hardcover.

Macmillan has a good reason for doing this. They're afraid that a $10 ebook will steal sales from the $25 hardcover. As I've noted in earlier posts, traditional publishers have lots of expenses to recoup. They have the author's advance, the cost of editing, book design, cover design, and marketing, plus they have to print books, warehouse them, ship them to distributors, and be prepared to accept returns. True, some of those costs don't apply to ebooks, but the creation of a book, print or digital, is expensive, and when Macmillan puts out a new book, they want the same profit for the ebook that they get for the hardcover, and they don't want the expensive hardcover to have to compete with a cheap ebook.

Recently Hachette and Harper Collins have joined Macmillan in demanding an agency model from Amazon.

Why is this happening now? The Apple iBookstore, which will open soon to provide books for the Apple iPad, uses the agency model. Now that publishers have a viable alternative to Amazon's Kindle, they can demand better terms from Amazon.

Kindle owners tend to resist spending more than $9.99 for an ebook, and as I am also a Kindle owner, I understand why. When I buy a paperback (I don't buy hardcovers), I can pass it along to friends or family, or sell it online or to a bookstore, or donate it to the library. If the ebook and the paperback are about the same price, I'll buy the paperback. It's all about value, what the book is worth to me.

I have on occasion bought the $9.99 ebook edition of a new release that was only available in hardcover, but I very much doubt I will ever pay more than that. I'll wait the 6-8 months until the paperback is available, or until the price of the ebook drops.

That's the consumer's point of view, and as a consumer, I won't be paying Macmillan their $15.

As an author/publisher, however, I'm ecstatic! My books, priced at $9.99 (with Book I at just 99 cents), will be that much more attractive, compared to new releases from traditional publishers.

But the best news is that Amazon is going to be offering a new contract to publishers starting in June. Right now I receive just 35% of the retail price of Kindle books. The new deal will offer me 70% of retail, less delivery costs of 15 cents per MB. There are a few conditions. The book must sell for between $2.99 and $9.99 retail. Aha! There's that $9.99 price point. Also, the ebook must be priced at least 20% less than the paperback price.

I will have no problem meeting those conditions, and that means that in June, I may be able to lower the price of my Kindle books. The meager 35% I get now means that I make over $1 less on ebooks than paperbacks. Because I sell 3 or 4 ebooks for every paperback, it's a reasonable trade-off, but it also means that I've been reluctant to price the ebooks at less than $9.99, especially given the very low cost of Book I.

We have Apple, Macmillan, and the agency model to thank for Amazon's new terms, because Amazon would never have done it without the competition. If you have read my earlier posts, you will remember that I have stated more than once that when Amazon wasn't the only game in town, they would have to give authors and publishers a better deal, but I didn't expect it to happen this soon.

There are more issues to discuss here, and I will be blogging about them in the next few days, so stay tuned.

Meanwhile, here are some interesting links.

An overview:
Amazon, Macmillan: an outsider's guide to the fight

Amazon's "new deal" for publishers:
Publishers Who Play Ball with Amazon's Kindle Will Get 70% Royalty Rate

Apple's iPad's effect on the publishing industry:
Hachette joins Macmillan's iPad Amazon pricing crusade

Ebooks and Smashwords

A remarkable thing happened on Christmas day. Amazon.com sold more e-books than physical books, which means there must have been a lot of Kindles under the tree.

Barnes & Noble sold out of their Nook e-book reader well before Christmas and more e-readers are being announced every day. Not only that, but now you can read ebooks on other devices, like your cell phone.

I love ebooks. They're usually cheaper than the paperback, I can download them instantly to my Kindle, and they don't overflow my bookshelves. As an author, I'm convinced that ebooks will become a large and important part of the publishing industry. I already sell 3 ebooks for each paperback. I have had my books available for Kindle for a year now, but getting distribution in online ebookstores other than Amazon is difficult. Most, like Fictionwise, don't contract with small fry like me.

But Smashwords contracts with all those ebookstores that won't contract with me, so I've made all three books of my trilogy available there. Smashwords has a premium catalog that distributes ebooks to Barnes & Noble, Fictionwise, Books On Board, and many other ebookstores. Smashwords also makes each book available in multiple formats, including html (for reading online), JavaScript, ePub, PDF, RTF, LRF for the Sony reader, PDB for anything running Palm OS, and plain text.

Smashwords doesn't use DRM, which is very good for the consumer. You can download any book you buy in multiple formats and install it on multiple devices. And as a consumer I really like that. As an author, however, I'm a bit nervous about watching the books I labored 10 years to write become Napsterized, but I'm hoping that the increased distribution will more than make up for the books that people share with their friends.

Link to When Women Were Warriors on Smashwords

The divine mind of the infinite

A week ago, Nicola Griffith blogged about something that happened to a lesbian couple in Miami. You can read all about it here:
Trembling with rage

For those of you who didn't read it, it's about a woman who died alone in a Miami hospital, while her life partner and their children were kept from her by hospital staff.

Colleen Lindsay read Nicola's blog and blogged about it here:
The Swivet: When Compassion Dies

Here's a comment from that blog, posted by Fawn Neun:

I'm just a straight chick, what do I know, except I know what's right. Love is love, people are people, nature creates us as we are meant to be and anyone who thinks they know better than millions of years of evolution or the divine mind of the infinite probably needs to check their ego at the door of reality.