Some thoughts on Amazon's Breakthrough Novel program.
I don’t want to detract at all from the points made (and the excellent writing done) by Porter Anderson over in his recent (20 June) Writing on the Ether column, While You Were Bashing Amazon
Summary: “On the Ether at JaneFriedman.com, Porter Anderson looks at Amazon Publishing’s latest strides — including $110,000 in Breakthrough Novel Award publishing contracts for authors and a new million-copy seller in translation.”
Flavour Quote: “Self-publication wasn’t a requirement of the competition, nor was it a problem. The rules of the Breakthrough Novel Award program prohibit entering material that has been under a publishing contract currently or previously. But as long as the rights have never left the author, an entry is valid. The entry period is normally in mid- to late-January. Up to 10,000 people can make one entry each. The competition, and the voting on the winners, is international and goes through several stages of selection and elimination. Walker remembers her self-published effort not quite languishing but not taking off, either. ‘I got a lot of good reviews. I won’t even tell you it was selling okay. It was tolerable, a few sales a week. For an indie author, that being my first book, and knowing it was part of a series, that was hopeful.’”
Money Quote: “While its challenges are contemporary, Amazon Publishing may have had no more difficulty finding traction in the market in its first couple of years than many of the well-established houses initially experienced decades ago. The ‘breakthroughs’ celebrated over the weekend may not lie only in those contracts for writers.
“And however many in Old Publishing may still decry Amazon Publishing as an incursion, many entrepreneurial authors recognize it as a new-work-nourishing player indigenous to an unprecedented global marketplace.”
As is typical for Anderson: this installment of Writing on the Ether is a well-thought-out, well-researched piece with plenty of links, quotes, and embedded tweets. And they post weekly. (Add JaneFriedman.com to your RSS feeds.)
You are both allowed and encouraged at this point to go read the whole thing.
##
Now, after reading about Amazon’s Breakthrough Novel contest and all the winners (a total of five authors across several genres) and the money involved (a $50,000 advance for a ‘no-name’, in 2013, is not unheard of but is still amazing) you might think that maybe Amazon isn’t too bad for books after all.
Maybe the tumult and pandemonium we’ve experienced over the past 15 years in bookselling and publishing (and technology, and the economy, and the plague of teen vampire fiction) have been worth it, because now on the other side things are easier than ever and hell, authors are even getting paid.
Indeed, for folks who are excited about books, the various Amazon imprints and the promotional programs and ebooks/Kindle/KDP and the huge stacks of money (filthy, glorious, internet-scale money) are all good things for books and authors, and the New Publishing that emerges will be better than the old regime it replaces. Sure, that’s fine.
“American Idol is an American reality-singing competition program created by Simon Fuller and produced by 19 Entertainment, and distributed by FremantleMedia North America. It began airing on Fox on June 11, 2002, as an addition to the Idols format based on the British series Pop Idol and has since become one of the most successful shows in the history of American television. For an unprecedented eight consecutive years, from the 2003–04 television season through the 2010–11 season, either its performance or result show had been ranked number one in U.S. television ratings. The concept of the series is to find new solo recording artists where the winner is determined by the viewers in America. Winners chosen by viewers through telephone, Internet, and SMS text voting.” : American Idol entry, on Wikipedia.
We can all remember how American Idol completely revitalized the music industry, right?
A contest is a contest, with winners and losers, and while I applaud the idea and congratulate the authors, I still object to manuscripts-as-lottery-tickets, and object most strenuously to manuscripts-as-lottery-tickets-as-a-business-model.
Writing is tough. Getting published used to be tough, now it’s “easy”, but the new barrier to entry is getting recognized, and our savior is not Amazon.
##
Let me pull back here from one more round of Amazon Bashing (because, as much as I enjoy it, it turns off many of my blog readers) and discuss publishing.
While many think the core unit of publishing is a huge multinational multimedia conglomerate, no, those monsters arose 30 years ago and gobbled up many of the ‘real’ publishers and subsumed them into the whole. The legacy publishers (post-gobbling) still exist as names-and-logos and are refered to as imprints of the larger ‘houses’ – ‘imprint’ as a term is also now often used to refer to some music labels (those wholly owned by the company that also distributes the music) and the music label analogy might work for some of you:
An imprint will have a staff that selects new works (books or music), works with the artist to polish and publish the work, ideally will have staff to market and promote the work, and also ideally will serve as advocate for the work in the event of legal trouble, or unfair competitive practices that limit the distribution of the work. Finally, an imprint should be interested in promoting the well-being of authors or artists (financially, primarily, but there are other ways to support authors), and encouraging and supporting them to produce more works.
Yes, I wear rose-colored glasses as I live in a sunshine-filled polly-anna world of rainbows and unicorns — but that aside, your publisher should have your back and the primary goal should be to make self-supporting, “good” works. A really trashy romance novel can still be a ‘good’ book; three-minute, three-cord, three-guitar-and-drums punk songs can still be ‘good’; a thousand-page tract on medieval farming techniques and the evolution of European plowshare and moldboard design (476-1349CE)… that only seven people will ever actually read… yes, can still be a ‘good’ work.
We all like to get paid. No disputing that. And the level at which a pulp novel is “self-supporting” is going to differ based on the goals of the author, the expectations of the publisher, and how much overhead each book has to carry.
For me: The core of publishing was the small publishing house that worked with their authors, built a small but meaningful backlist, didn’t sweat the money too much, and waited for the occasional bestseller not because it meant winning the book lottery, but because the occasional bestseller paid for the rest and supported the whole. Call me a big fan of Maxwell Perkins. (who is Maxwell Perkins, you ask? *sigh* – here, go read.)
In as much as Amazon’s Imprints can step in and achieve my ideal goal for publishers, to support authors in producing self-sustaining works, then I applaud their efforts and wish them well.
However, Amazon’s publishing efforts do not exist in a vacuum. A paranoid bookseller or small publisher might see these new imprints as part of a larger, systematic program carried out by Amazon to lock both readers and authors into a closed ecosystem (controlled by Amazon) while also continuing to parasitically suck the life out of the rest of industry.
In 2012, Amazon had $61.09 Billion in revenues. (They actually booked a loss of $39 Million because of acquisitions and investments in logistical support structure, but heh, they’re Amazon so Wall Street is cool with that.) A $50,000 advance to a first time author is one hell of a payday, though again not entirely unprecedented — but for Amazon: fifty grand is .0000008% of their sales in 2012. Less than one-millionth of the total. Amazon also ‘awarded’ four other runners-up $15,000 each; all together, for every million dollars Amazon made, they set aside $1.80 to fund this program. Amazingly generous.
I’d love to see this scaled up just a bit. And would it kill Amazon to make it an outright prize, and not just an advance on future royalties? Particularly when Amazon (and others) seem to have trouble with the accounting when it comes to author payments?
I could be a real ass and compare Amazon’s Breakthrough Novel Award with B&N’s Discover Great New Writers program, which directly awards $10,000 to two winners annually and comes with in-store support and display space — running the same kind of calculation as above, the cash prizes are $2.94 out of every million dollars in sales (B&N reported $6.8 Billion in revenue for fiscal 2013) — but I suppose the catch is in the submission criteria for B&N: to be considered you need a published book, and your publisher has to submit your entry for you. If you have someone at your publisher or imprint who is supportive of you and your work, who “has your back”, that’s kind of a minor point. (the getting-published-on-dead-trees-bit is the taller hurdle)
##
Prizes and recognition are both excellent things for books. Not just these new programs but the established awards (Nobel, Booker, National, Pulitzer, et al.) and genre awards (where to start?) and I can’t say for sure that Amazon’s new program is bad, ill-advised, or exploitative — but given that the prizes are all publication deals with Amazon (not merely the recognition and money), it strikes me as more of an extremely creative way to manage the e-slush-pile of manuscripts than an award, and I object to it on those grounds.
Here’s an idea for Amazon: A Breakthrough Imprint Award — find an editor or publisher (publisher, in this case, referring to the person who runs a small press, magazine, or imprint) and give them enough money to hire a small staff, give them the “keys” to KDP such that author royalties would not go down and the imprint could take a small chunk of Amazon’s cut on a book, and give them 2 years to find authors and build up a backlist, and a brand. Let current imprints apply, too, but set aside enough cash to seed 50 imprints (or more) and really get the ball rolling on Amazon publishing. Back-of-the-envelope numbers – a quarter million would fund 2 full-time editors and a part-time office manager for two years at less-than-New-York-but-hardly-starvation salaries. $25 Million would fund a hundred of these seed programs — and with established e-book publishing channels taking care of the old printing and distribution tasks, books could be coming out of these imprints within months. A couple-hundred editors engaging thousands of authors with the intent of publishing great books — 100 imprints all working on defining their niche and building a great backlist. Give your publishers/EICs wide rein to consider any business model they like: monthly magazines, serialized novels, multi-author anthologies, “old fashioned” ebooks — so long as they sell as e-books or e-singles over your platform.
That’d be $12.5 Million a year as an ongoing investment — though I suppose you could declare a “winner” and cut the program early at any time. You could also treat that $250,000 as an advance against royalties (the 5% per book or whatever is determined) so you would still be out some cash, but in the process of making it back.
I give away these great business ideas because *I* personally don’t have that kind of cash hanging around. Amazon does. Barnes & Noble is in trouble but they could certainly spare $25 Million. The major houses might scrape up the same amount, too, if they thought it was worthwhile. (I’m starting to doubt their judgement.)
It’s a pity so much money gets pissed away on app development these days, when for a fraction of that we could be supporting the production of books. (and with the same-or-better success rate, if you ask me)
