Urgh. Amazon really IS taking over the world.

jazzman99 said:

Meh, I'll get more worried if somebody on the level of Stephen King or George R. R. Martin or James Patterson--a name-brand author whose new releases actually get people into bookstores who otherwise don't go there regularly--suddenly makes all their books Amazon exclusives. And that's not happening for a long, long time, if ever. Marshall's book might be terrific (as celebrity memoirs go), but it's not likely to be a must-read for a lot of people.

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I was talking to my boyfriend about this yesterday, and there are a lot of ways this can be potentially bad. Let's say, for instance, that rather than going after all of the really big Stephen Kings of the world, Amazon goes for the midlist.

Amazon is backed by a massive company making such huge profits that it can afford to take some pretty big hits if it benefits them in the long run. Publishing companies don't have quite the same degree of flexibility.

Let's say Amazon starts bidding on midlist authors, offering them thousands more than the big six can offer. How many authors, particularly midlist authors who don't make a ton, would turn them down? I don't even know 100% that I would. I want to, but if they offered me a lot of money and I could pay off my student loans and afford health insurance, it would be incredibly tempting. And I'm sure an awful lot of authors out there feel the same way.

So Amazon starts siphoning off authors by offering much bigger advances. Now whether or not they're able to really provide the same kind of quality product in this case, but let's say it happens. It's conceivable that in order to keep authors, publishers are going to be forced to start offering higher advances and higher royalties. If that's the case, they're taking more risk. The more risk they have to take, the more they're going to want to take that risk on known sellers that they think will be big.

In this kind of scenario, the whole situation could actually be a negative because it could force the other big publishers to take on fewer authors and to drop more new authors who don't sell big. This is already a problem, but it could be exacerbated. This could actually make it harder for a new author to get published (or stay published).

I'm not psychic so I can't say whether this will happen or not. I just see a lot of ways that this could be bad for authors in general.

That's one of the questions I had asked. It makes sense for Amazon to make those books exclusive on certain levels (screws over the competition), but I'm not sure if that's actually the case. For all I know the hardcovers will be available anywhere. Does anyone know what their distribution on the print books is like?

It sounds like they're talking mass print runs. That was the impression I was under, anyway.

ios said:

I don't think Amazon can do it. Rather, I hope it will be a good thing. In general, I see new competition amongst big business as beneficial to others, in this case, from readers to writers to even employees.



Jodi

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The problem here is that this isn't fair competition. This isn't people on about the same level playing the same game. Amazon has massive amounts of capital from all of the other ventures they're undertaking. They can afford to offer goods and make deals at rates that vastly undercut the competition in order to eliminate it. In much the same way Wal-mart moving into an area kills all of the local businesses, you have a corporation that is so huge and powerful with enough wealth to intentionally undercut the competition.

The less competition there is, the better for Amazon. They get a bigger share of the market. Healthy competition is a good thing, and in the short run this could have a few benefits to authors (better royalties, better advances, etc.), but long-term this could cause massive problems. We could start seeing more publishers go under, or unwilling to take risks on unknowns. Amazon could get a big enough piece of the cake that they are then able to change their policies so that instead of losing money, they're making a fortune--which would be at the author's expense.

There's a reason why monopolies are illegal.

Bubastes said:

I wonder how far things will go before antitrust law kicks in?

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See, I've wondered this as well. Now, it seems like a lot of massive companies are breaking antitrust laws and getting away with it at the moment (Monsanto, anyone?) so I'm not sure what it would take to get it prosecuted, but I've actually posed this question to people before and been told that Amazon would be very hard to prosecute because of the online nature of the business. I have no idea if that's true or not, but has anything like that ever been done?

Well this is beyond CreateSpace. This is Amazon working as an actual, advance paying commercial publisher and doing everything a commercial publisher would do. They're trying to branch beyond the self-publishing market.