Stephanie Leary

Writer and WordPress consultant

  • Books
    • Content Strategy for WordPress (2015)
    • WordPress for Web Developers (2013)
    • Beginning WordPress 3 (2010)
  • Blog
    • Fascism Watch (2016-17)
    • Content Modeling for WordPress series
    • WordPress Hidden Gems series
  • Work
    • Portfolio
    • Services
    • WordPress Plugins
    • WordPress Themes
    • Presentations and Interviews
    • on GitHub →
  • About
    • Press Kit
  • Contact
    • Mailing List

Amazon is not negotiating lower ebook prices for your benefit

January 31, 2010 Stephanie Leary 1 Comment

On Friday, Amazon stopped selling Macmillan books, including Tor SF, Minotaur mysteries, and several other things I buy a lot. It’s a bullying move in a heated negotiation over how ebooks are sold.

Before you say, “Go Amazon! Fight those publishers and their $15 ebooks!” you need to understand a little bit more about how publishing works. Go read what Tobias Buckell, Charles Stross, and Jay Lake and Cory Doctorow have to say about it. Are they biased? Well, yeah, they’re all Tor authors, so they’re pretty pissed. At the same time, they’re ebook consumers, and they have a pretty well-balanced understanding of the situation.

Do not assume that because they’re negotiating for a lower fixed price, Amazon is on your side. Macmillan is trying to introduce variable pricing, where books are more expensive when they first come out and then get cheaper than Amazon’s fixed price — just like hardcover/paperback works now. In fighting this, Amazon is positioning itself more like a publishing subcontractor and less like a bookstore. The problem for Macmillan (and every other major publisher) is that the money it makes on those initially-more-expensive books is what allows it to a) stay in business, and b) take risks on new or unknown authors. Publishing operates on a razor-thin margin, and publishers know damn well that paper printed books are going away. They have to work out an ebook model that doesn’t slice off the profitable part of their business. Amazon’s model does.

Update: Amazon has folded. Their letter is strangely worded. I like Laura Anne Gilman’s response.

Update 2: Mary Robinette Kowal hilariously skewers the Amazon letter, and Scott Westerfeld has a remarkably sane overview of the situation.

Publishing

Comments

  1. Nojh says

    February 1, 2010 at 8:51 am

    The gaming industry does the same thing I understand. Early sales cover a majority of the cost of the game and also gets funneled into new games.

    Of course unlike the book industry, the gaming industry has been fighting a quiet war against 2nd hand sales first with pre-order unlockable content, now pre-order Downloadable content, and now just plain DRMed digital distribution.

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Fascism Watch

The Fascism Watch is a daily(ish) news roundup. View all the previous Fascism Watch posts »

Latest WordPress Book

Content Strategy for WordPress

A short book for content strategists and managers on implementing a complete content strategy in WordPress: evaluation, analysis, content modeling, editing and workflows, and long-term planning and maintenance.

Read the sample chapter

Kindle Nook iBooks Kobo Smashwords

WordPress for Web Developers

WordPress for Web Developers (9781430258667)

This is a book for professional web designers and developers who already know HTML and CSS, and want to learn to build sites with WordPress. The book begins with a detailed tour of the administration screens and settings, then digs into server-side topics like performance and security. The second half of the book is devoted to development: learning to build WordPress themes and plugins.

This is the second, much-revised and updated edition of Beginning WordPress 3, with a more accurate title. Everything’s been updated for WordPress 3.6.

WordPress for Web Developers is out now. See what's inside...

The best WordPress features you’ve never noticed

  • WordPress Hidden Gems: Screen Options
  • WordPress Hidden Gems: Bulk Edit
  • WordPress Hidden Gems: Private Status
  • WordPress Hidden Gems: Dashboard Feed Readers
  • WordPress Hidden Gems: Options.php

Content Modeling for WordPress series

  • Content modeling for WordPress, part 1: analyze content
  • Content modeling for WordPress, part 2: functional and organizational requirements
  • Content modeling for WordPress, part 3: a sample content model

This is an excerpt from Content Strategy for WordPress.My latest books are Content Strategy for WordPress (2015) and WordPress for Web Developers (2013). Sign up to be notified when I have a new book for you.

Copyright © 2021 Stephanie Leary