Comments on: Amazon is not your best friend: Why self-published authors should side with Hachette 06/2014/amazon-is-not-your-best-friend-why-self-published-authors-should-side-with-hachette/ A Lawyer's Thoughts on Authors, Self-Publishing and Traditional Publishing Wed, 09 Jul 2014 16:00:08 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.9.1 By: old coot-ette 06/2014/amazon-is-not-your-best-friend-why-self-published-authors-should-side-with-hachette/#comment-220107 Fri, 20 Jun 2014 15:31:02 +0000 ?p=53101#comment-220107 What Dustin said +1000. I put my writing on hold some 30 years ago because I didn’t have enough energy to write stories and grade freshman papers. Now, only now, I am able to dream of returning to fiction. I love to tell stories! So far this year, I have published one academic book and have an online course and an accompanying workbook in the works for the fall. When all those are out of the pipeline, I will focus more on the fiction.

People like the quality of my work, and when I tell them “I did it all myself,” they are amazed. (Not that it is perfect, but good enough.)

More importantly, I have been spreading the word, quietly, to at least 3 more potential authors. Writers in general support each other, which is why I think we are pushing back against the “don’t go it alone” scare.

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By: K. A. Jordan 06/2014/amazon-is-not-your-best-friend-why-self-published-authors-should-side-with-hachette/#comment-220015 Fri, 20 Jun 2014 02:56:36 +0000 ?p=53101#comment-220015 Not knowing King, but thinking highly of him, I doubt he would throw a fit.

However, in parts of corporate America, the faintest breath of critism to someone that important to an imprint might mean the end of one’s job.

Ah…Mike has just confirmed my suspicions.

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By: Scott 06/2014/amazon-is-not-your-best-friend-why-self-published-authors-should-side-with-hachette/#comment-219999 Fri, 20 Jun 2014 00:36:10 +0000 ?p=53101#comment-219999 I recall a comedian who used to imitate the British guy who hosted Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous…he’d say “Look at this lovely house…it’s something you’ll never have!” That’s sort of how I felt about traditional publishing. It was something I would never have. So why bother with them? Take my chances, put my writing (and myself) out there and go for it.

It takes too much time and effort to query agents and publishing houses, in my view…at least for me. I don’t have any problem with anyone going that route, but I don’t really envy them, either.

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By: Scott 06/2014/amazon-is-not-your-best-friend-why-self-published-authors-should-side-with-hachette/#comment-219993 Thu, 19 Jun 2014 23:40:26 +0000 ?p=53101#comment-219993 I wonder. King doesn’t seem like the vengeful vindictive type who would get so ticked off if someone suggested rewrites or cuts or whatever. OTOH, I realize that he does in fact love his wordiness – witness the two versions of THE STAND.

I recently skimmed Piers Anthony’s BUT WHAT OF EARTH? which isn’t so much a novel (Anthony refers it to a middling work in his intro) but an indictment of damage done by copyeditors and editors and rewriters. It’s interesting.

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By: Suzan Harden 06/2014/amazon-is-not-your-best-friend-why-self-published-authors-should-side-with-hachette/#comment-219980 Thu, 19 Jun 2014 21:48:11 +0000 ?p=53101#comment-219980 ROFL Now I need to set aside the caffeinated beverage before reading any more of your comments, USAF.

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By: K. A. Jordan 06/2014/amazon-is-not-your-best-friend-why-self-published-authors-should-side-with-hachette/#comment-219971 Thu, 19 Jun 2014 21:00:09 +0000 ?p=53101#comment-219971 I agree with you.

I suspect no one wanted to be the person to tell King he needed a re-write. Angering King would be job-sucide.

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By: K. A. Jordan 06/2014/amazon-is-not-your-best-friend-why-self-published-authors-should-side-with-hachette/#comment-219970 Thu, 19 Jun 2014 20:56:54 +0000 ?p=53101#comment-219970 “Clearly she doesn’t know much about indie authors at all.”

I agree. Many Indie authors were never rejected by big publishing.

They never bothered to jump through the Agent hoops in the first place.

You can’t get rejected (by big publishing) unless you actually GET to the desks of the big publishers.

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By: Meryl Yourish 06/2014/amazon-is-not-your-best-friend-why-self-published-authors-should-side-with-hachette/#comment-219881 Thu, 19 Jun 2014 15:24:18 +0000 ?p=53101#comment-219881 Why, thank you, USAF. :-)

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By: Sheila 06/2014/amazon-is-not-your-best-friend-why-self-published-authors-should-side-with-hachette/#comment-219846 Thu, 19 Jun 2014 12:42:02 +0000 ?p=53101#comment-219846 “Ms. Miller seems to be stuck in the year 2011.”

This is something I’ve noticed about all these types of articles: everybody seems to be stuck at least two years in the past. I’m not sure what’s causing this, seeing how fast ebooks have changed over the last few years — in a very public way.

I know I have no hatred of traditional publishing. I found self-publishing while researching the latest news in publishing. I was out of work and figured I might as well see if I could become a writer (a life-long dream).

I never got around to submitting to a “real” publishing company, because I found Joe Konrath’s blog and got converted. :D

I have no great love for Amazon, or any retailer that I may chose to sell my books. It’s a business deal, which Ms. Miller and her ilk can’t seem to wrap their brains around.

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By: William Ockham 06/2014/amazon-is-not-your-best-friend-why-self-published-authors-should-side-with-hachette/#comment-219840 Thu, 19 Jun 2014 11:52:03 +0000 ?p=53101#comment-219840 I would like you to consider the possibility that you are suffering from confirmation bias. I have no doubt that what you say is true from your own experience, but I wonder if your experience is entirely representative of the larger picture. There is indeed a lot of ranting on self-pub forums, but that doesn’t really tell you much about the Amazon-Hachette just as the ranting on political forums wouldn’t tell you much about whether or not Eric Cantor was going to lose his primary.

It is very easy to write off snark and anger when you don’t know much about the people and their experiences. I am sure some folks are operating off of “a thimbleful of skewed information and a lot of incorrect assumptions” and others know more about the industry than you do.

When you say no one is against self-published authors, I wonder what you mean by that. I would say that a publisher who would prefer that self-published books be segregated from his and other traditional publishers’ books are against self-published authors. The fact that most of your author friends are hybrid tells me that your experience is decidedly not typical. In fact, you are a real outlier in this respect. Nothing wrong with that, but it does mean that you should be careful about reasoning from that experience to the bigger picture.

With respect to prices, I think your perspective is preventing you from seeing the situation clearly. I have no doubt that your customers behave exactly the way you describe. That information may or not be relevant to most of the people here. Their potential customers may behave in a completely different way. Readers aren’t a single class who behave the same way. Individual readers don’t even apply the same analysis to different types of books. I will use my own behavior as an example.

I read 100+ fiction books a year. That makes me atypical, but there are a few million people like me in the U.S. I buy very few non-fiction books a year, but I often pay 10x per book for those titles. Do I value those titles more than the novels? I wouldn’t put it that way, but some people would see it that way. I don’t think of the non-fiction books as being in the same product category as the fiction I buy.

The issue isn’t whether or not readers pay more for books they believe are worth more (like all mental models that is partly true and partly false), the issue us whether that model of reader behavior is useful to self-published authors, small publishers, and the Big 5. The answer might be different for each group or even for different people in the same group. My analysis of reader behavior is that it is a generally unhelpful idea. It confuses the different types of value that different readers derive from books and leads to poorly informed decision-making. I don’t know your situation so I cannot say whether not it is harmful to you and I would encourage you to take a hard look at what value readers derive from the books you publish and where that value comes from.

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