What’s Going On With Amazon?

Posted by in Publishing, Writing

A lot of my clients and friends are wondering what my opinion is, of  Amazon in its “war” with the publisher Hachette. The bare facts are these: We officially know nothing about the negotiations between the two, but most industry insiders are guessing that the issue is over terms for ebooks, and that Amazon wants to keep more of the money than Hachette wants. (For further details, here’s the link to the New York Times piece on it.)

On its face I have no problem with this. Amazon is a seller and it has the right to work out any terms it wants. What I don’t like, and in fact am shocked by, is the way Amazon is bullying Hachette. Of course Hachette is a very large corporation, and I have been no big fan of mainstream publishing for many reasons over the last thirty years, but when Amazon starts taking advance order buttons off the pages of Hachette books, or slowing delivery from 2-3 days to 2-3 weeks, or even recommending buying a different book altogether, it seems like bullying. That is, flexing your power to show your adversary that they’d better give in, quick.

I know many authors and small publishers love Amazon. They point out how much Amazon has done for authors—making it easy for their books to be available and found by readers, providing real sales information, and not incidentally, paying authors and small publishers quickly. A title that is up on Amazon can be seen by any reader, and the searches permit all titles to be treated equally, they all have “shelf space” where they can be found nationally and internationally. These are not small things. They make it possible for some authors and small publishers to have successful careers and thriving businesses. And that’s before we take into account what they have done for ebooks by creating a successful piece of technology for reading books (the Kindle) and an easy way to buy books through the one-click download, which has become an easy impulse-buy for many readers.

Essentially, Amazon has created a huge database and search system that has made it simpler for readers and authors to find each other, and I agree that for this they should be rewarded. (Here’s a link to a blog that calls into question the Big Five publishers.)

However, and this is a big however:  from the beginning, Amazon, while it likes to paint a picture of itself as a benevolent company, a la Google, that is only helping with its innovative technologies, almost immediately began acting like the chain bookstores which in the late 80s and early 90s almost put independent bookstores out of business with the support of the big five publishers who found it easier to make deals with only two companies (at the time, Borders and Barnes and Noble) rather than the four thousand or so independent bookstores that existed then, one at a time. What the five publishers couldn’t see was that by letting either the chains or Amazon (who in effect became a third chain) have the power over the market by not supporting independents, they were allowing Amazon to become the dominant force in publishing today. (The number of independent bookstores has dropped by about half, to 1900 today—although recently, it has been going up again.)

And Amazon has a lot of power. It has cornered 40% of the market for books. 40%! So no small publisher, big publisher, or author, can afford to ignore Amazon and not take a big cut, in terms of finding audience and earning money. The authors who are praising Amazon today might be very surprised to discover, after Amazon has its way with Hachette and the other publishers (which I could see happening), that they next turn on the authors and take a greater share of their profits too. Right now no author has a contract with Amazon that guarantees their payout. Amazon reserves the right to change terms and prices at any time.

For this reason I think everyone who cares about readers and authors (not the publishing industry as it exists today, but the real core of it, which is the marketplace between readers and authors) should be concerned about this. What to do about it is another question. I’m not sure Stephen Colbert’s solution of boycotting Amazon and supporting a large independent bookstore like Powell’s is the right one. But my advice to authors is that your best protection in all the vagaries of publishing today is to know who your reader (or potential reader) is, and find a way to reach them now. And, to keep them. (That means yes have an email list, yes have a Facebook group, yes respond to people online.) Connecting directly with your audience yourself will empower you, and no matter which way things go, you will find a way to keep going forward.

What I really don’t get is why Amazon seems to want to take over the world. Can’t it be happy with a tidy little profit on what it does really well? Deliver “everything,” everywhere, really quickly? Does it have to take over the whole market? This gets into questions about capitalism and being funded by Wall Street and it’s a much larger discussion than I can get into here. But I honestly don’t know that this is good for anyone, including Amazon itself.

In my dream world, the folks at Amazon wake up one day and realize that businesses work better when businesses actually serve their customers, and work in cooperation with vendors to achieve that. A girl can dream.