With Amazon's KDP, you get to publish 'worldwide' (well, within Amazon's limits) as far as I can tell. I suppose there are other drawbacks, but for someone starting out who doesn't want to deal with that mess, it seems like it might be a decent option.
> They have a publishing subsidiary and allow me—if I want to self-publish—to use them as a sales channel, and will even pay quite well if I accept extremely onerous terms. But they don't do much else for me and in particular if I were to self-publish through Amazon I would be vulnerable to exactly the same pressure that Hachette is currently on the receiving end of, but with less recourse.
> Amazon's strategy (as I noted in 2012) is to squat on the distribution channel, artificially subsidize the price of ebooks ("dumping" or predatory pricing) to get consumers hooked, rely on DRM on the walled garden of the Kindle store to lock consumers onto their platform, and then to use their monopsony buying power to grab the publishers' share of the profits.
Is it better to not deal with the mess, or to jump into the maw of the beast? ;)
From an user perspective, those walled garden for ebooks are a real problem.
Since I like to have a paper copy of my books, I have a working solution, not perfect though:
* If there is a paper version, buy the paper version.
* If there is a DRM-free ebook, download it somewhere or buy it (depending on the price and added work, like a new cover, ...)
* If the is only DRM version, download a DRM-free version for free once it's available.
* If there is no paper version:
* If there is a DRM-free edition, buy it
* If there is only a DRM version, no good solution there, either a pass or a download somewhere.
My reader is a Kindle, so not perfect there, but I manage by keeping it in airplane mode at all time, to avoid stupid updates (like the 1984 fiasco), and by adding book only through Calibre instead of amazon's library manager.
If there's only a DRM edition, [cough] crack the DRM. Doing this for Kindle ebooks is easy enough that I half-suspect there's a deliberate policy of winking at it on AMZN's part.
I'm not going to tempt fate by providing pointers here but if you ask in the comments on my blog I will be less restrained.
I'd rather not pay to support retailers like Amazon that sell DRM-crippled books, just to (illegally) circumvent it. I'll demonstrate that I don't support this by only buying DRM-free books.
The same pattern occurs in TV, film, and games. In movies, for instance, a lot of the money is made in selling foreign distribution rights. There is still a significant cost associated with exhibiting movies in China, for example, including localization, marketing, distribution to theaters, etc. An American studio would rather license off the rights to a foreign distributor, taking a sort of annuity income stream, than incur those costs and burdens itself. This has become so lucrative, in fact, that foreign sales potential often "wags the dog" in the domestic (US) market. Movies get financed and produced off of pre-sales to other territories. (This is a mildly simplified way of describing the process, but on the whole, it will probably suffice).
So you see these patterns play out in the home video market as an aftereffect. Rights were carved up and sold off during the theatrical window, and more rights were carved up and sold off in anticipation of the home video window. And by the time that window rolls around, various parties hold the rights to various spots on the map. It's in the interest of none of those parties to break down DRM or region control.
It's hard to overstate the systemic importance of foreign distribution to the moviemaking business. Accordingly, it's hard to overstate the fierceness with which studios and distributors will fight to maintain region controls and exhibition windows.
Eventually, this model will have to give. It makes increasingly little sense to consumers. And, while there was once a physical scarcity making it necessary, that scarcity is largely nonexistent (barring extensive local marketing costs). But it'll be a long time before we see any major changes here. There are just so many parties aligned against change, and the capital costs of building a competing ecosystem are enormous.
With books, the barriers to entry are much lower. So I have a bit more hope for that market in the next few years.
Sounds like an agent is failing at middleman-ing to coordinate all those messy contracts.
It sounds like a terribly complicated project for a startup to disrupt the agent market by providing the agent a set of tools both technological and legal to massively coordinate releases across all markets simultaneously and cheaply for like 1% of the agent's cut or whatever seems fair. Or maybe for free during the initial startup phase. Two "portals" (I hate that word) one that agents talk to and one that publishers talk to and some minor smarts in the middle.
Or if you really wanna be disruptive implement Charlie's helper to do all the good stuff he's previously discussed for a publisher. I don't know if becoming a book publisher is edgy web 2.0 enough to attract VC money, but if everyone in the biz thinks the current situation sucks, and there's some profit to be made in market disruption...
The TLDR is a lot of "startup" theory is about disrupting middlemen. How about trying to make middlemen effective again using disruptive tools?
Just what is the deal with authors and advances? Endemic poor planning? When I read things like, "This means that they can't offer me a bigger book advance for world rights than they would for their own regional rights (because they might not succeed in licensing those territorial sub-rights—this has bitten me in the past)," I wonder if it wouldn't be significantly simpler all around if authors worked on straight royalties.
I get that it would mean that an author would not get a big, lump sum payment with which to write the next work. On the other hand, what was the author eating while writing the first book? Further, most advances are not going to keep a body in beans and rice for very long. And I get that under current schemes, most authors don't earn out their advances, and that a larger-than-royalties advance is the only thing that makes writing a paying occupation. But, I find the idea of someone making a loan that they don't expect to be paid back fully is economically sketchy. It smacks of company-store policies. Also, while the "gambling" aspect does support the idea that a few bestsellers subsidize dozens of other, less successful, authors, I think it equally supports the idea that new authors are barred from the marketplace: giving an unproven author with a genre-barrier-crossing any advance is singularly unpalatable.
I think it gets good writers, writers that can sell books, writing the next book for the publisher, instead of doing something else.
As a writer, you can request any type of payment scheme you like, if the publisher also agrees, you're set. That means you can work on straight royalties if you want.
This is probably what the OP means by the reference to "medium-term pain" for authors. In order to transition from up-front lump sum to after-release royalties, you have to turn down advances for future books and open a gap in your income stream until the royalties start coming in.
12 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 43.5 ms ] thread> They have a publishing subsidiary and allow me—if I want to self-publish—to use them as a sales channel, and will even pay quite well if I accept extremely onerous terms. But they don't do much else for me and in particular if I were to self-publish through Amazon I would be vulnerable to exactly the same pressure that Hachette is currently on the receiving end of, but with less recourse.
> Amazon's strategy (as I noted in 2012) is to squat on the distribution channel, artificially subsidize the price of ebooks ("dumping" or predatory pricing) to get consumers hooked, rely on DRM on the walled garden of the Kindle store to lock consumers onto their platform, and then to use their monopsony buying power to grab the publishers' share of the profits.
Is it better to not deal with the mess, or to jump into the maw of the beast? ;)
Also, Stross is not starting out.
No, obviously not. My comment was aimed at readers, not at cstross.
You can uncheck 'DRM' on the KDP, but the way, they don't require it, although I think you have to say yes if you sign up for certain benefits.
My reader is a Kindle, so not perfect there, but I manage by keeping it in airplane mode at all time, to avoid stupid updates (like the 1984 fiasco), and by adding book only through Calibre instead of amazon's library manager.
I'm not going to tempt fate by providing pointers here but if you ask in the comments on my blog I will be less restrained.
Since ebooks are zip with a well-defined file hierarchy, I may even be able to hack the unnecessary bits to achieve freedom on my own.
Nice to see that some authors share that point of view.
So you see these patterns play out in the home video market as an aftereffect. Rights were carved up and sold off during the theatrical window, and more rights were carved up and sold off in anticipation of the home video window. And by the time that window rolls around, various parties hold the rights to various spots on the map. It's in the interest of none of those parties to break down DRM or region control.
It's hard to overstate the systemic importance of foreign distribution to the moviemaking business. Accordingly, it's hard to overstate the fierceness with which studios and distributors will fight to maintain region controls and exhibition windows.
Eventually, this model will have to give. It makes increasingly little sense to consumers. And, while there was once a physical scarcity making it necessary, that scarcity is largely nonexistent (barring extensive local marketing costs). But it'll be a long time before we see any major changes here. There are just so many parties aligned against change, and the capital costs of building a competing ecosystem are enormous.
With books, the barriers to entry are much lower. So I have a bit more hope for that market in the next few years.
It sounds like a terribly complicated project for a startup to disrupt the agent market by providing the agent a set of tools both technological and legal to massively coordinate releases across all markets simultaneously and cheaply for like 1% of the agent's cut or whatever seems fair. Or maybe for free during the initial startup phase. Two "portals" (I hate that word) one that agents talk to and one that publishers talk to and some minor smarts in the middle.
Or if you really wanna be disruptive implement Charlie's helper to do all the good stuff he's previously discussed for a publisher. I don't know if becoming a book publisher is edgy web 2.0 enough to attract VC money, but if everyone in the biz thinks the current situation sucks, and there's some profit to be made in market disruption...
The TLDR is a lot of "startup" theory is about disrupting middlemen. How about trying to make middlemen effective again using disruptive tools?
(BTW I like his latest book)
I get that it would mean that an author would not get a big, lump sum payment with which to write the next work. On the other hand, what was the author eating while writing the first book? Further, most advances are not going to keep a body in beans and rice for very long. And I get that under current schemes, most authors don't earn out their advances, and that a larger-than-royalties advance is the only thing that makes writing a paying occupation. But, I find the idea of someone making a loan that they don't expect to be paid back fully is economically sketchy. It smacks of company-store policies. Also, while the "gambling" aspect does support the idea that a few bestsellers subsidize dozens of other, less successful, authors, I think it equally supports the idea that new authors are barred from the marketplace: giving an unproven author with a genre-barrier-crossing any advance is singularly unpalatable.
As a writer, you can request any type of payment scheme you like, if the publisher also agrees, you're set. That means you can work on straight royalties if you want.