The Authors Who Love Amazon

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From The Atlantic:

For most of Prime Day, Amazon’s annual sales bonanza, an unfamiliar face topped the site’s Author Rank page: Mike Omer, a 39-year-old Israeli computer engineer and self-published author whose profile picture is a candid shot of a young, blond man in sunglasses sitting on grass. He was—and at the time of this writing, still is—ranked above J.K. Rowling (No.8), James Patterson (No. 9), and Stephen King (No. 10) in sales of all his books on Amazon.com. His most recent book is ranked tenth on Amazon Charts, which Amazon launched after The New York Times stopped issuing e-book rankings, and which measures sales of individual books on Amazon.

. . . .

Omer is one of a growing number of authors who have found self-publishing on Amazon’s platform to be very lucrative. While he may not be as familiar a name as the big authors marketed by traditional publishing houses, and may not have as many total book sales, Omer is making an enviable living from his writing. Sales of his first e-book, Spider’s Web, and its sequels, allowed him to quit his job and become a full-time author. Now, he makes more money than he did as a computer engineer. “I’m making a really nice salary, even by American standards,” he said.

After the success of Omer’s first book series, Thomas & Mercer, an Amazon imprint, published his most recent book, a mystery called A Killer’s Mind, which was also promoted on Amazon’s First Reads, a new subscription service in which the company recommends a handful of books and allows subscribers to download them before their official publication date. Omer told me he has now sold more than 10,000 books through Amazon, and that his books have also been borrowed more than 10,000 times on Kindle Unlimited, the subscription service in which readers pay $9.99 a month to access over 1 million titles on Amazon. “What made this possible is Amazon,” he told me. “It can expose me to millions, or tens of millions of readers.”

. . . .

For decades, self-publishing was derided as an embarrassing sign that an author couldn’t cut it in the “real” publishing industry—“the literary world’s version of masturbation,” as Salon once put it. And Amazon, the world’s biggest e-commerce site, with its bookstore-beating prices, was painted as an enemy to authors. But now its self-publishing service, Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), has made it easy for people to upload their books, send them out into the universe, and make money doing so. Its store has created a place for readers to go and easily find inexpensive self-published books. The site that got its start by radically changing where books are sold is now reshaping how books are published and read.

This is, of course, threatening to the traditional publishing industry, which seems to be in a state of everlasting free-fall. Industrywide, self-publishing is gaining readers as traditional publishers are losing them, according to Author Earnings, a site produced by an anonymous marketing analytics expert who calls himself Data Guy. The self-published share of paid US e-book units increased to 46.4 percent from 44.7 percent between the second quarters of 2017 and 2018, Data Guy told me in an email, while the traditionally published share of paid e-book units decreased to 43.2 percent from 45.5 percent. (His data takes into account self-published and Amazon imprint-published books, which many traditional data sources do not.)

Central to Amazon’s gambit—and authors’ pay—is Kindle Unlimited. Launched in 2014, the feature was a response to other companies that were trying to create a Netflix for books, such as Oyster, which shut down in 2015, and Scribd, which is slowly gaining acceptance from the Big Five publishing houses. Authors can choose to participate in KDP Select, which automatically puts a book into Kindle Unlimited, and which can be highly lucrative.

. . . .

The payment ends up being a little less than half a penny per page, authors told me, but those who are read the most can also get monthly bonuses as high as $25,000. Last year, Amazon paid out more than $220 million to authors, the company told me. Regardless of participation in KDP Select, authors who self-publish on Amazon through KDP also earn a 70 percent royalty on books priced between $2.99 and $9.99, and a 35 percent royalty on books that cost more or less than that.

. . . .

Of course, there are some things that KDP Select doesn’t offer, like printed books and shelf space in bookstores across the country, or a chance to get on the New York Times bestseller lists. But King and Robinson have tried the traditional route, and found it less lucrative than Amazon. In 2016, they published their first book from a “real” publishing house, Carina Press, an imprint of Harlequin, which is a division of HarperCollins. Seeing their book, Everything for Her, on shelves was satisfying—Robinson cried when she saw the book in Barnes & Noble—but working with a traditional publisher was an adjustment. It took nearly a year between the time they finished the book and the time it was published; on Amazon, it usually takes about two weeks. The book was much longer than their traditional works, at 95,000 words, yet the money was about half what it would have been with Amazon. “It felt really prestigious and good for our career,” Robinson said, “but the money wasn’t the same as with Amazon.” They decided, after that experience, to return to self-publishing.

People outside of Amazon warn that Kindle Unlimited and Amazon’s publishing model more broadly are threatening the very foundations of the industry. “It’s a cancer. It’s going to undermine the entire publishing industry,” Mark Coker, the founder and CEO of Smashwords, an e-book distributor for indie authors, said to me about Kindle Unlimited. Though authors may feel like they’re benefiting in the short-term, he argued, the Unlimited model is training people to read books for what feels like free. “Amazon is putting the thumb on the scale—although customers will happily pay for books, they give these books out for even cheaper,” he said.

. . . .

Authors getting all their sales from Amazon are playing a dangerous game, Coker said. “In the long term, authors are mortgaging their independence,” he said. “They’re no longer indie authors, they’re dependent authors.”

But for now, self-published authors seem to be willing to take that risk. Samantha Christy told me that an agent recently approached her to talk to her about going the traditional publishing route. She’s going to meet with the agent, but traditional publishing has little appeal, especially because she would get a much smaller cut of sales that way. “Why give away a piece of the pie, if you don’t need to?” she said.

Link to the rest at The Atlantic

16 thoughts on “The Authors Who Love Amazon”

  1. ‘This is, of course, threatening to the traditional publishing industry’

    I was reading along, not paying much attention, until I hit that phrase, realized that the Atlantic has been living in the 12th century for a long time, and quit.

    What? Did they just discover self-publishing and are examining it like a shiny pebble found on a beach?

  2. Coker said. “In the long term, authors are mortgaging their independence,” he said. “They’re no longer indie authors, they’re dependent authors.”

    He’s correct. It’s a standard business principle. Authors need to develop a diverse stream of income to protect themselves against shifts in the marketplace.

    At the same time, if they’re making a lot of money off KU, they need to bank as much of that as possible to tide them over times of low sales or if they get kicked out.

    Make your plans for those kinds of futures, and you won’t be found napping should it happen. And if it doesn’t, what have you lost?

    • Funny how he glosses over the fact that writers never had any ‘independence’ before Amazon, before they were always ‘dependent’ on trad-pub and most of them ended up eating rejection notices.

      And even for those writers that got a few shillings for one of their stories, there was no safety in expecting trad-pub to buy their next book as well.

      • Excellent point, Anonymous! Authors have never been truly independent before, so exactly WHAT has changed?

        If an author trad pubs, they’re dependent on their publisher to provide editing, formatting, book covers, etc AND then receive a small portion of actual sales for however long their publisher maintains their book for sale. (Of course, that assume an author’s work is even deemed “worthy” by the gatekeepers, who seem to assume they know what readers ACTUALLY want.) If the publisher decides not to offer another contract (happens all the time), or goes out of business (as we’ve seen a lot of them do the past several years), or commit fraud (as we’ve seen a couple do fairly recently), the author is out of luck. When you sign a contract with a trad pub, you’re stuck for the life of that contract, regardless of how good (or lousy) a job the pub does.

        If an author indie pubs, they’re subject to the various issues that come with whatever avenues they go. The more distributors an author uses, the more work they go through to get their books out there for readers. Then there are the peculiars of each distributor to learn, and adaptations to make as they change. Indies are only dependent to the degree they WISH to be. No contracts to tie us down. Regardless of who we publish our books through – Amazon only, Smashwords, D2D, Kobo, Nook Press, etc – we’re “dependent” on them for distribution to readers. As the tides change, we can go with them.

        If indies want to publish Amazon-only, that’s their prerogative, and many of them are more in-tuned to the publishing industry that people like Coker seem to think. (Am I the only one who gets tired of his chicken-little imitations?) If indies want to publish wide, with however many vendors, that’s fine, too. The benefit of being indie is the freedom to make such choices for ourselves, and to change our minds and tactics as the tides in the industry change. That alone is reason for trad publishers to fuss. LOL

        • Sorry, I was more or less just pointing out that this was just another ADS piece, these jokers can’t find any real dirt to dish on Amazon so they’re left with making stuff up about the ‘good old days’ before Amazon.

        • Authors have never been truly independent before, so exactly WHAT has changed?

          The author deals directly with the retailer.

          • And pockets the middleman’s share of the revenues.

            Good for the author, less so for the middleman left to blame libraries for declining sales.

      • “Funny how he glosses over the fact that writers never had any ‘independence’ before Amazon, before they were always ‘dependent’ on trad-pub…”

        The “he” in question here runs “an e-book distributor for indie authors.” He is comparing KU with self-publishing while distributing books through multiple channels. It isn’t “funny” that he doesn’t talk about something else entirely. The evils of traditional publishing aren’t everyone’s obsession, to be brought up in unrelated conversations.

        • It’s the same old game, a writer was either stuck with a contract for their story with one publisher – or in this case only in electronic form on Amazon if they wish to play in the KU.

          Or is this just ‘sour grapes’ because if the writer happens to pick KU that means they can’t at the same time go ‘wide’ and the he in question can’t also try to sell them?

          As KU is the writer’s choice to do or not to do this piece was simply ADS …

  3. If you want pointless whining about Amazon, Mark Coker’s got to be on anyone’s shortlist for a quote.

    Is it Amazon’s fault the SW site looks like a teenager’s web site circa 1995?

    • And isn’t it sad that SW is the B&N of epublishing? They had the edge as the only game in town, but they’re so wedded to their meatgrinder, Draft2digital had no problem elbowing them out of the way.

    • I wonder… Does the OP rail at the free sample people in his grocery store, that they are making people expect free food all the time?

      There are quite a few products, including books, that I would never have tried if I had to plunk down the normal purchase price on them. KU is a better deal for the producer, too – they actually get paid for giving out “free” samples, instead of paying somebody minimum wage to stand at their little cart, importuning every passer by to try them out.

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