Amazon removes Hachette buy links from its stores.

Status
Not open for further replies.

Aggy B.

Not as sweet as you think
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Feb 28, 2008
Messages
11,882
Reaction score
1,557
Location
Just north of the Deep South
Which is different from publishers, how?

On the one hand, I'm not certain it is different. My point was simply that all this support of Amazon for sticking it to trade publishing have nothing to do with Amazon "looking out" for authors.

On the other hand Amazon sells stuff. Books is part of that stuff, but not the entirety of it. Publishers on the other hand sell books. They have to maintain at least a minimal working relationship with authors or they will have nothing to sell. Naturally, with any business relationship everyone wants whatever deal will benefit them the most while still allowing them to stay in business. Authors and publishers can usually find some sort of balance here because they both negotiate certain things from the other. But Amazon, obviously, wants what's best for it and is proposing terms that will hurt both authors and publishers. Especially since what they want from the publishers is likely to conflict with the contracts already in place.
 
Last edited:

Mr Flibble

They've been very bad, Mr Flibble
Kind Benefactor
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Jan 6, 2008
Messages
18,889
Reaction score
5,029
Location
We couldn't possibly do that. Who'd clear up the m
Website
francisknightbooks.co.uk
See, it's comments like this that I think muddy the water of this issue.

Then again, first they came for...and I did nothing...


Wholesalers/manufacturers in other industries set a price they sell to the retailer for. If the retailer then decides to discount that is up to them. The manufacturer doesn't take that cost*. The retailer does. Amazon wants to discount stuff and charge the manufacturer for the privilege of doing it. Which er...well...

If U run a nuts and bolts shop and decide that nuts are half price this week, I don't pay the manufacturer less for them because that is my decision. They don;t lose from my decision.



*except in certain circs where they concur. But mostly...no. Certain manufacturers pay us to promo stuff (in other ways) but we decide what to discount.

ETA it is almost certainly more complex than that -- but that is the crux.
 
Last edited:

aruna

On a wing and a prayer
Super Member
Registered
Joined
May 14, 2005
Messages
12,862
Reaction score
2,846
Location
A Small Town in Germany
Website
www.sharonmaas.co.uk
Is it understandable that Amazon wants to make as much money as possible for themselves? Of course it is. But that's their only motivation - making money. They are never about improving things for authors/readers unless it spells more money for themselves.

Which is different from publishers, how?

I have the same question! :) If (big) publishers want to "improve things" for authors, why do we have agents? Why do we need agents?

I'll tell you a little anecdote. Last winter I was offered a digital contract by HarperCollins for my out-of-print, rights-reverted first novel. I was all excited, at first. I had been sitting like a beggar outside their palace on Fulham Palace Road, London, for a decade, yearning to get back in through those doors, at any price.

My wonderful editor, however, had rejected every one of the four novels I wrote in those ten years; not because they were bad but because the publisher, ie the number-crunching men-in-suits at the top, did not think there was a market for what I wrote -- the Brits can't take too much diversity, it seems.

Anyway. I presented the offer to my agent, Trident Media, who decided they didn't want to negotiate the contract for me. And HC then told me that they had a dispute with TM due to their 25% royalty rate. Which made me take a more critical look at the deal.

Long story short, I decided to go it alone, and after a bit of back and forth with a very nice employee (who always had to discuss things with some nameless higher-up before replying to my questions) they sent the contract, which I forwarded to my contact at the Society of Authors. At least six changes had to be made, all of which were things we had agreed upon via email, and all of course in HC's favour. It was all extremely devious. They would have been very happy to pay me even less, you can be sure! Just because I didn't have an agent. They agreed to all the changes. I came very close to signing.

But in the end I chose to go with an independent publisher. When I got their contract I also forwarded it to SoA, and nothing had to be altered. In fact, one of the terms was so favourable to me SoA commented on it. Personally, I'd rather be a big fish in a small pond than a small fish in a big pond. I got more that twice the royalty and many times more attention.

Another thing: a few years after the rights to that book reverted to me, I discovered that HC had secretly put a PoD edition on sale on Amazon. Totally illegally, and behind my back.

So, like I said: they are no angels, and definitely not out to help authors.

They are both big corporations.That really says it all.
 
Last edited:

Torgo

Formerly Phantom of Krankor.
Kind Benefactor
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Apr 7, 2005
Messages
7,632
Reaction score
1,204
Location
London, UK
Website
torgoblog.blogspot.com
I have the same question! :) If (big) publishers want to "improve things" for authors, why do we have agents? Why do we need agents?

Publishers don't have identical goals to authors, no, but they are in many cases parallel. The more copies you both sell as partners, the more money you both make. The trick is to come to a fair distribution of the proceeds, because the obvious point at which partners could come to blows is in sharing out the loot.

Over the course of an author's relationship with a publisher, the sense of what is fair and equitable is going to change over time, and probably on both sides. It's great to have an agent who is an expert in the book business to look out for your interest when it comes to, essentially, setting a value on your next book, or your next three books, etc. This is always about speculation and risk (unless you're one of a small number of absolute bankers - I can think of a handful of authors who regularly earn out six-figure UK advances on the day of publication, for example.)

I just think that once the ink is dry on the contract the interests of author and publisher should absolutely align, because the idea is to make as much money out of the book as possible. And if the book turns out to be way profitable than you thought -

There's a Nasrudin story. Mullah Nasrudin goes to a Turkish bath, and because he's kind of a scruffy guy, the attendants are rude to him. They give him the scratchy little towels and a tiny scrap of soap. As he leaves, he tips them each a gold coin and strolls off. Next week he's in again. "Wow!" think the attendants. Out come the fluffy towels and the perfumed oils and the massage. When it's all over Nasrudin tips them a copper penny each. The attendants are indignant. "Hey, what happened to the gold coins?" one of them blurts out. "Oh, they were for this time. The pennies were for last time," the Mullah says.
 

Aggy B.

Not as sweet as you think
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Feb 28, 2008
Messages
11,882
Reaction score
1,557
Location
Just north of the Deep South
I don't think I said publishers automatically equal wonderful. However, publishers are in a business relationship with authors on one side and Amazon on the other. Amazon is just in a business relationship with the publishers.

To recap what I understand as the two major sticking points of the situation: Amazon wants publishers to let them sell their books for less money and give Amazon a larger percentage of the sale price. Amazon also want to be able to Print-on-demand at their whim if a book goes out of print or there's a delay in delivery from the publisher.

Neither of those things benefit authors. The first will force the publisher to cut back on costs in order to maintain a profit margin, and the obvious place to do that is with the money they pay authors, marketing, cover and interior design, etc. (since from what I understand the production side is already pretty cost efficient). The second, of course, nullifies the idea of a book going out of print and allowing rights reversion.

What may happen is that publishers just start selling their books online themselves. Most smaller presses offer that option, so it's not a big leap to think the big houses can do it too. In which case Amazon will still sell self-pubbed books and other stuff. I won't say it wouldn't hurt them if they had none of the Big 5 selling through their market, but they have plenty of other streams of stuff to sell.
 

RedWombat

Runs With Scissors
Absolute Sage
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Jul 3, 2006
Messages
1,197
Reaction score
327
Location
North Carolina
Website
www.ursulavernon.com
I have the same question! :) If (big) publishers want to "improve things" for authors, why do we have agents? Why do we need agents?

The same reason I got a pre-nup.

Even if I love you deeply and passionately and would take a bullet for you today, tomorrow is a different story. I may hate you. You may hate me. I may be dead, in which case you should assume that any contract will be litigated by my worst and most vile money-grubbing relative who posts conspiracy theories about the moon landing and lizard people to Facebook and is trying to raise money to run for office on an anti-lizard people platform and to feed his crippling Pocky addiction.

I am not capable of negotiating my own contracts--that's a skillset, and one I do not possess. I am bad at saying "No" or "You are asking me for changes I am not comfortable making." I am happy to have an agent who DOES have those skills, and who is capable of being a combination of cheerleader and enforcer. (It does not mean that my publisher is bad to ask for these things, incidentally, it means that any relationship requires boundaries and figuring out where they are can be awkward, even with good intentions all around.)

My publisher is treating me very well at the moment, and I do not think they want to make me unhappy, but everyone is happier when we have a contract and a buffer between us.
 

Torgo

Formerly Phantom of Krankor.
Kind Benefactor
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Apr 7, 2005
Messages
7,632
Reaction score
1,204
Location
London, UK
Website
torgoblog.blogspot.com
The second, of course, nullifies the idea of a book going out of print and allowing rights reversion.

Depends what the reversion clause says; since POD became a thing, a reversion clause may be less about lack of stock and more about lack of sales.

Before, if a book was out of stock, you'd look at what it was selling and how many dues (orders) were outstanding and decide whether to reprint x thousand books or not. Now it's more feasible to order x dozen, or even one at a time. But if you're selling a dozen books a year, you might as well have your rights back.

What may happen is that publishers just start selling their books online themselves. Most smaller presses offer that option, so it's not a big leap to think the big houses can do it too. In which case Amazon will still sell self-pubbed books and other stuff. I won't say it wouldn't hurt them if they had none of the Big 5 selling through their market, but they have plenty of other streams of stuff to sell.

I had this conversation in the swanky HQ of my last firm (as a children's publisher, I was generally relegated to an outbuilding) about five years ago. "Hey, seeing as Amazon is such a dangerous potential enemy, and is moving in to publishing, why don't us publishers collectively move in to retail?" The response I got from more senior publishers was "We simply don't have the capital to set up a competing retail/ebook platform, and besides, we have signed a lot of contracts with retailers that would make various parts of that plan difficult or outright impossible. But yes, that would be the obvious move otherwise."

They've tried stuff on a smaller scale, but at this point it feels like saying "Hey, let's get into the MP3 player business!" a few years after iPod launched.
 
Joined
Jun 29, 2008
Messages
11,042
Reaction score
841
Location
Second star on the right and on 'til morning.
Website
atsiko.wordpress.com
In order to take market share away from Amazon, and business organization would have to take risks that are not incredibly likely to pay off. I don't have the exact numbers on me right now (anyone who does would be awesome to link to them), but it's my understanding that the majority of people who have e-book readers have kindles.

In order to compete with that, someone would have to come out with a better ebook reader--which would cost a ton of R&D money, in which case they would still have to deal with Amazon's current giant market share in ebooks, contained within the kindle format. It'd probably turn out a lot like Google+ vs. Facebook.

They could withdraw their contracts with Amazon, and focus on Apple and the Nook, but those have failed to have a huge impact on Kindle's share of the e-reader or e-book market so far, in which case publishers would mostly just be losing their Kindle and Amazon print sales. Assuming they don't have the capital to launch their own e-book/e-commerce platform, they certainly don't have the capital to try playing the loss-leader game that Amazon has played by giving better prices to Nook and Apple, and they would just be furthering the devaluing of e-books and books anyway.

That's the problem with the DOJ saying their apple deal was collusion. Fighting Amazon would take drastic measures, and most of the methods publishers could afford to use would probably have similar results re: the DOJ.
 

Hapax Legomenon

Super Member
Registered
Joined
Jun 28, 2007
Messages
22,289
Reaction score
1,491
A publisher would not have to develop their own ereader to sell books on their own website; they would merely have to start selling them without DRM.
 

Torgo

Formerly Phantom of Krankor.
Kind Benefactor
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Apr 7, 2005
Messages
7,632
Reaction score
1,204
Location
London, UK
Website
torgoblog.blogspot.com
A publisher would not have to develop their own ereader to sell books on their own website; they would merely have to start selling them without DRM.

Oh, they pretty much all do that anyway - selling them on their own website. They use Adobe DRM for that. The upshot is, they sell hardly any books, because DRM - it's outside the Kindle ecosystem - and because they won't discount like Amazon will.

But yes, I do advocate dropping DRM entirely, and particularly for everyone at the same time. It'd help create competition.
 

Sheryl Nantus

Holding out for a Superhero...
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Feb 12, 2005
Messages
7,196
Reaction score
1,634
Age
59
Location
Brownsville, Pennsylvania. Or New Babbage, Second
Website
www.sherylnantus.com
Unfortunately many publishers ARE selling from their websites and not getting great numbers - for the most part readers want the ease and convenience of hitting a button and having the book sent to their ereader of choice - be it Kindle, Nook, Kobo etc.

Many websites selling ebooks have this problem - it's not DRM that's scaring people off, it's the trouble of having to sideboard the files to their reader and many of them would rather link to a big store like Amazon than deal with the technical stuff.

At least from where I'm sitting...
 

fivetoesten

Super Member
Registered
Joined
Jul 28, 2010
Messages
337
Reaction score
33
it's the trouble of having to sideboard the files to their reader

I like being able to download a book straight to my device, and I do it all the time--but is plugging in a cable really all that difficult? Plug drag unplug read. Ta daaa!
 
Last edited:
Joined
Jun 29, 2008
Messages
11,042
Reaction score
841
Location
Second star on the right and on 'til morning.
Website
atsiko.wordpress.com
A publisher would not have to develop their own ereader to sell books on their own website; they would merely have to start selling them without DRM.


That's true to a point. But aren't most ebooks published in epub format which Kindle doesn't support? And most people who have e-readers have Kindles, as I understand it.

So they don't have to make their own e-reader, but if they don't then people keep using Kindle, might as well buy from Amazon, still have the same problem as before.
 
Last edited:

Sheryl Nantus

Holding out for a Superhero...
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Feb 12, 2005
Messages
7,196
Reaction score
1,634
Age
59
Location
Brownsville, Pennsylvania. Or New Babbage, Second
Website
www.sherylnantus.com
I like being able to download a book straight to my device, and I do it all the time--but is plugging in a cable really all that difficult? Plug drag unplug read. Ta daaa!

You'd be surprised at how people think.

Besides, it's more than that to be honest - you have to know WHERE to put the file.

Amazon makes their money because of the one-click send-it-to-my-Kindle ease. No muss no fuss, you don't have to know what TYPE of file you need to download and transfer (remember there's a variety of formats!) and so forth.

People generally like things as easy as they can get.
 

aruna

On a wing and a prayer
Super Member
Registered
Joined
May 14, 2005
Messages
12,862
Reaction score
2,846
Location
A Small Town in Germany
Website
www.sharonmaas.co.uk
Publishers don't have identical goals to authors, no, but they are in many cases parallel. The more copies you both sell as partners, the more money you both make. .

That might well be, but I quickly learned that there were two classes of authors: those that the publisher deemed "big" right from the get-go -- quite independently of the book they had written -- and those that were basically sent out to wing it. The former were placed on tables and cover out on shelves. The others -- well. I was one of the latter. No table for me, and the book hidden on the shelves spine out.

The day my book was first published, another author also had his debut, with a book aimed at the same readership. The thing is, he was a Name, a writer for the Daily Mail, so he got A Class treatment, and I got Class B. Guess who ended up as a bestseller.

I'm not going to comment on that first book. But I remember a woman reading it when we went to Tobago that summer, and saying it was so trite, and how disappointed she was.

Many things happened in those four years, things that disappointed me; I just don't talk about them publicly because I hate whingeing.

In the end it was all for the best, since struggling for ten years made me a much better writer. I don't regret anything.
 

Torgo

Formerly Phantom of Krankor.
Kind Benefactor
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Apr 7, 2005
Messages
7,632
Reaction score
1,204
Location
London, UK
Website
torgoblog.blogspot.com
That might well be, but I quickly learned that there were two classes of authors: those that the publisher deemed "big" right from the get-go -- quite independently of the book they had written -- and those that were basically sent out to wing it. The former were placed on tables and cover out on shelves. The others -- well. I was one of the latter. No table for me, and the book hidden on the shelves spine out.

The publisher's paid for the ones on the tables and cover-out, so yes, there are often two tiers - the ones that get co-op fees spent on them and the ones that don't. I think there's often a problem with publishers allocating all their marketing budgets to the most expensive books - you've paid a big advance, so the book has to do well, so you put more money behind it, and so on. Whereas the book that you would really like to do brilliantly would be the one you paid very little for.

But I'd also reiterate that if your publisher just dumps your book on the market and walks away to do something else, you're being badly published; it's against their interests too. I've seen that rather too often. (And of course you very occasionally get the kind of shocking behaviour you've experienced!)
 

aruna

On a wing and a prayer
Super Member
Registered
Joined
May 14, 2005
Messages
12,862
Reaction score
2,846
Location
A Small Town in Germany
Website
www.sharonmaas.co.uk
To add insult to injury -- when I went on a book signing with two HC members of staff they spent most of the time chatting about the wonderful huge launch party they'd been to for that other Name author the night before -- who (big writers) was there, what they had to eat and drink, etc. I got a "launch lunch" with about 6 or 7 invitees...
Mind you, I hate big parties and was very happy with my little lunch; but the difference in treatment was very obvious! Anyway, as I said, it was all for the best. Who knows, if I'd been succesful back then I would have become a lazy, self-satisfied author. This way I was forced to keep trying, if only to prove them wrong (about British readers)! And I will.
 
Last edited:

fivetoesten

Super Member
Registered
Joined
Jul 28, 2010
Messages
337
Reaction score
33
It seems like a small step but most people prefer to skip small steps if they can manage.

I understand, and I promise I'll totally leave it alone after this, but not being willing to learn or take such a small step is a little like not taking a sip of coffee because your cup is an inch from its normal spot, but you'd be fine if a stranger put a locked lid on it and then charged you to nudge it that inch and open it...

I mean, there's easy and then there's easy.
 

Hapax Legomenon

Super Member
Registered
Joined
Jun 28, 2007
Messages
22,289
Reaction score
1,491
Well I don't think most people know/understand what DRM does, and if they do, they think it's a good thing because it apparently prevents pirates from stealing books.
 

Mr Flibble

They've been very bad, Mr Flibble
Kind Benefactor
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Jan 6, 2008
Messages
18,889
Reaction score
5,029
Location
We couldn't possibly do that. Who'd clear up the m
Website
francisknightbooks.co.uk
An interesting nugget from the Bookseller.

39% of US book buyers are aware of the dispute

19% of them are buying fewer books at Amazon as a result (though 4% are buying more and just under 40% report no change - the rest had no opinion on the dispute)

Still just under 20% of buyers who are aware of the dispute (ie 8% of their total customer base) buying fewer books at amazon because of this is interesting. I wonder if it'll change anything.
 
Last edited:

ShaunHorton

AW's resident Velociraptor
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Jan 6, 2014
Messages
3,550
Reaction score
511
Location
Washington State
Website
shaunhorton.blogspot.com
It turns out Amazon is doing it for the children.

Amazon blog post titled: Update re: Amazon/Hachette Business Interruption

Isn't that a bit disingenuous?

True, we all could've done without the little snap at the percentage Hachette passes on to it's authors, but are not the basic points sound?

I don't know about the exact numbers, but I have little doubt a fair number of people are probably driven away from purchasing ebooks costing $14.99 or more. I know it certainly doesn't make sense to me and I'm not about to pay that much. If I want a book that badly, I'll borrow a paperback from a friend. Or buy the *gasp* cheaper paperback. Oh, right, that's the point of pricing ebooks so high isn't it? So that the paper market continues to live, somewhat?

Doesn't the math also bear out that, profit wise all around, selling two books at $9.99 is more for all than one book at $14.99? Yes, at a certain point, the pie does start shrinking again, but I seriously doubt the point of sales vs. price balances at $15 a book.
 
Last edited:
Status
Not open for further replies.