Rocket Bomber - article - bookselling - publishing - Under the Dome: Authors and "Publishers" in Kindlespace

“But again, this is a bad comparison. Royalties to authors aren’t the same as profits to publishers. We are the publisher when we self-publish. So start comparing our 70% take to a publishers’ 60% take when they deliver a book to a bookstore — keeping in mind that we don’t have a physical location to lease, shipping costs, or employee wages — and you’ll see that this is a very fair, sustainable, and permanent rate. If anything, there’s room for it to be more generous.
“Just like the sky, this rate isn’t coming down. And I’m not afraid to put a public declaration on this. Because hey, the chicken littles and the Jeremiads are wrong every single time. Yes, even tomorrow. Especially tomorrow.” [emphasis in original]
The Sky is Falling! The Sky is Falling! : Hugh C. Howey, 20 December 2013, hughhowey.com

Mr. Howey was responding to this Kindleboards post: A thought on how it could get much tougher, which I saw first via The Passive Voice

— Hugh Howey deserves credit, kudos, and all due respect for what he has been able to accomplish as an author and businessperson (in that he makes money; that’s how business-types keep score) but I can’t say I see any improvement in a market where there were once 50 different players, and now there is functionally only one.

Hugh casts his relationship to Amazon in one light: He, acting as his own publisher, provides the books to Amazon’s bookstore — selling to Amazon wholesale for 30% of the retail price. When put this way, Amazon appears to be Howey’s customer (and we maintain the illusion that Amazon is a “bookseller” and “bookstore”).

If allowed, I’d like to re-phrase Hugh’s main point: Actually, Amazon is allowing Hugh to use their app store to sell downloads, for which they take a 30% commission on sales. Amazon doesn’t need to collect more than 30% because they aren’t really doing anything except listing the book and facilitating downloads (just like Apple does with their App store, for example – and Apple also charges software developers 30%).

Hugh is right: the sky isn’t falling, Amazon is likely just fine paying authors 70% and hell, over time, they might even be willing to pay more. But Amazon is not the customer in the current KDP program: The Authors are. Authors give up that 30% to use the Amazon website to facilitate their own sales. Amazon makes commissions off the sales, but isn’t ‘publishing’ them, and certainly isn’t buying the virtual books to put on virtual shelves. It’s a listing; Amazon isn’t a bookstore, just like the old Books In Print wasn’t a bookstore.

Amazon and the Kindle ecosystem they’ve built are great tools for authors, but the things that make them great are also the things that make Amazon so very different from the old publisher-bookstore pipeline. To gloss over the differences with bold declarations that We are the publisher is, dare I say it, attempting to blind people to the real truth by shouting.

As “author” or “publisher”, where else do you go that isn’t Amazon? I don’t care how good the rates are, he kind of skims over the fact that Amazon set the rate for him: Hugh did not negotiate it. The Sky isn’t falling. There is no sky, when we all have to live under Amazon’s dome.

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I’d like to point out that Hugh Howey is a New York Times Bestselling author, and is making lots of money, and also managed both feats starting out as a self-published author on Kindle so maybe he knows something I don’t about how this all works. And now that he’s famous with an established fanbase, he could easily go it alone and sell direct to readers outside of Amazon, so maybe his perspective from his current position is correct. But for the rest of us? I don’t know.

I do think that self-publishing in 2014 is different than it was in 2011. If nothing else, the field is more crowded — plus Amazon continually tweaks their listings to make it harder to ‘game’ their system, so breaking out of the ebook pack like Hugh did is much tougher. This idea that Kindle authors are ‘publishers’ and not clients using Amazon services isn’t going to help anyone navigate that system.