Killing the Competition

I obviously don’t have any sort of inside information about what Amazon thinks it’s going to do publishing-wise, but given the company’s public statements on its future as a publisher, I doubt that sucking up all the popular, crappy genre authors is their end goal. If that, in fact, is their goal as a publishing entity, then they’re much dumber than I’ve been giving them credit for. But I doubt it is, since anyone can see how well the pay-huge-advances-to-celebrity-authors model has been working for the big six publishers.

Publishers like to pretend that we make our money from discovering unknown talents for small advances and selling millions of their books. That’s a very small part of our business. The bestselling books are all written by celebs, by people with huge platforms, by fiction writers with a long history of bestselling books, or by people who do a proposal that’s on its surface brilliant. In short, there’s a bidding war among the publishers over the big books. We all know what the good books are–it all comes down to how much of an advance we’re willing to pay for them. The hotly fought-for books are the ones that sell. And while we might not make huge profit % on these, we make big profit $ on these. They keep the lights on by covering overhead. Better to cover our fixed costs by going all in on a few big books than trying to buy dozens of mid-list books.

But in recent years, as book sales have declined, the advances for the biggest books have gone down proportionally, too. What used to be a $1 million book is now a $400,000 book. Publishers are thinking, “OK, we’ll move less copies but we’ll pay less for them, so we’ll survive.” Enter Amazon’s print publishing arm. They hired this guy Larry Kirshbaum to run it–he’s a savvy vet with 30+ years of publishing experience–and they have some editors, too. And they’ve been paying a ton of money for books.

Is it too much to hope that if Amazon is successful in jacking all these authors from the big six that they’ll stumble on to a publishing model that doesn’t rely on crappy books and is more sustainable?

. . . adding here, it takes a lot more work than it might seem to make someone like James Patterson’s books salable. Even if Amazon can steal him from whomever’s got him, it’s not clear to me that they’re got the capacity to turn his books into salable product. Multiply that times 50 celeb authors, and one wonders just what will happen. Keep in mind, Amazon is a technology company.

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