How Amazon’s crackdown on scammers is impacting indie authors
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Tag Archives: ebook publishing
How Amazon’s crackdown on scammers is impacting indie authors
Amazon ebook sales
May 2015 Author Earnings Report
Source: http://authorearnings.com/report/may-2015-author-earnings-report/
Welcome to the May 2015 Author Earnings Report. This is our sixth quarterly look at Amazon’s ebook sales, with data taken on over 200,000 bestselling ebooks. With each report over the past year and a half, we have come to see great consistency in our results, but there is always something new that surprises us. Often, it’s something we weren’t expecting, like the massive shadow industry of ISBN-less ebooks being sold, or the effect Kindle Unlimited has on title visibility. This time, we went into our report curious about one thing in particular. But we were still not prepared for what we found.
If you’ve been shopping for ebooks on Amazon lately, you may have seen this new addition to many ebook product pages:
This announcement can be found on ebooks from several of the largest publishers, and it appears to serve as both an apology from Amazon and also a shifting of the blame for high ebook prices. Amazon has stated in the past that they believe ebooks should not cost more than $9.99. Self-published authors are no doubt familiar with this price constraint, as their royalties are cut in half if they price higher than this amount. But after a contentious and drawn-out negotiation with Hachette Book Group last year, Amazon relinquished the ability to discount ebooks with several publishers. Prices with these publishers are now set firmly by them.
Soon after these agreements went into place, industry observers noted an upward move in average ebook prices. Freed from Amazon’s discounting, and with complete control over pricing, the publishers made a decision to push the price of many of their books above $9.99.
With six quarterly snapshots, each snapshot consisting of 50,000+ of the top-selling ebook titles, we plotted the average price by publisher type to see just how much prices have gone up. The blue bars show the price of self-published ebooks for each of our reports. The purple bars show the average price of Big 5 published ebooks.
Since we started pulling this data, the average price of an ebook from a Big 5 publisher has gone up 17%. Compare this to a difference of 5% for self-published titles, or the increase of 7.5% across Amazon imprints. The prices for Big 5 published ebooks have risen quite steadily, rather than a sudden surge since the return to agency.
What will the effect of these pricing decisions have on unit sales, revenues, and author earnings? We were eager to find out.
The May 2015 Author Earnings Report
We start with a simple counting of the number of titles on Amazon’s ebook bestseller lists. No math involved, just a detailed look at whose works are showing up as top-selling titles. For comparison, we included the same graph from our January 2015 report.
Number of Titles in Amazon’s Ebook Best Seller Lists
In the last three months, the Big 5 publishers have seen a 26% reduction in the number of titles on Amazon’s Best Seller lists. This means fewer titles are selling well enough to make these lists, and it also means fewer titles are receiving that added visibility.
Ebook Unit Sales
Over the same period, daily unit sales from the Big 5 have fallen 17%. This is a measure of the average rank of each ebook. Just as publishers study the New York Times bestseller lists to gauge the strength of their competition, we are looking at the same thing. But with a sample size of 200,000, rather than 20.
Rest of the article: http://authorearnings.com/report/may-2015-author-earnings-report/
Filed under 2016, ebook publishing
Amazon Is NOT the Vladimir Putin of the Publishing World – The Daily Beast
Amazon Is NOT the Vladimir Putin of the Publishing World – The Daily Beast.
by Nick Gillespie
In its battle with Hachette, Amazon is being compared to Putin and the Mafia—by critics who want you to pay more for books.
Can you believe those…those…those…sons of bitches at Amazon? After launching almost 20 years ago and making virtually every book—new, used, dead-tree, electronic, audio, and I’m guessing any day now, olfactory—available to everyone in America at good-to-great prices, the company’s true character now stands revealed. It’s not pretty, folks. Despite a huge market share, Amazon apparently still wants books, especially the e-books that everyone agrees are the future of the medium, to be cheaper than what publishers and big-name authors want you to pay for them.
Just who the hell does Amazon think it is? Maybe a bare-chested tyrant who used to work for the KGB? Amazon is “like Vladimir Putin mobilizing his troops along the Ukrainian border,” a proprietor of an “e-book discovery site” tells The New York Times. “A bully,” offers Richard Russo, the novelist and president of the Authors Guild (which knows exactly how to bully mere “writers”). Amazon, says author James Patterson, who published 13 detective books last year, is waging “war” and doing unspeakable things for which “the quality of American literature will suffer.” No, wait. That’s all wrong. Amazon isn’t like a Russian despot waging a war, says Dennis Loy, proprietor of the small publisher Melville House. It’s more like “the Mafia.”
Filed under Amazon, book publishing, publishing
A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing: Fisking Lilith Saintcrow and the Hachette/Amazon Situation
A Newbie's Guide to Publishing: Fisking Lilith Saintcrow and the Hachette/Amazon Situation.
Sample of blog entry:
Fisking Lilith Saintcrow and the Hachette/Amazon Situation
People often disagree with my posts, and some do it in the comments section.
This promotes healthy debate and discourse. As long as people stay civil with each other, they can post whatever they like, including insulting me. I’ve only had to kick a few people out over the years, after giving them multiple chances to cool off.
One of the wonderful things about the Internet is the ability for people to engage with different viewpoints and test each others’ arguments.
I don’t know Lilith Saintcrow. She’s a writer with Hachette, and has just blogged about this situation. She’s wrong, which is fine. Normally that wouldn’t irk me. But in her comments section, she’s disemvoweling people who disagree with her (it’s a cute form of censuring where all the vowels are removed from the comment).
So now I’m going to bring the debate here, to A Newbie’s Guide, by explaining in detail how wrong Lili Saintcrow is. Normally I don’t take my peers to task like this, but I really dislike the way Lili is handling dissenters on her blog. She’s deliberately obstructing what could have been a healthy debate.
No offense intended, Lili. I’m sure you’re a wonderful person and a wonderful writer. And I do understand how you are frustrated at this situation. Your sales are suffering, and it is beyond your control, so naturally you want to place blame and voice your discontent.
But I believe you aren’t looking at the big picture, and cutting off comments on your blog isn’t how you, or anyone following you, can use this situation as a learning experience.
Blog post in its completeness: http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2014/05/fisking-lilith-saintcrow-and.html
Filed under Uncategorized
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