Amazon

Amazon Turns the World of Web Serials on its Head

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This post, by PJ Kaiser, originally appeared on Tuesday Serial on 9/13/12.

When it comes to publishing serial stories, writers have faced a conundrum. There are very few online formats that lend themselves to publishing installments. Smashwards specifically disallows unfinished works, and Amazon and Barnes & Noble force the publisher to package each installment separately unless it’s a completed work. This means each episode / installment has its own price, its own cover, its own description, its own reviews. The reviews make it a particularly sticky issue because if the first installment has glowing reviews, those reviews don’t show up automatically on the seventeenth installment. Readers have to go to some trouble to track it all down.

Roz Morris recently wrote an insightful post about her somewhat frustrating experiencing publishing her novel “My Memories of a Future Life” in installments on Amazon. She recapped her issues and lamented the fact that Amazon and other publishers didn’t easily allow for the publishing of a serial in installments.

Just after she had published her post, however, Amazon made an announcement which has the potential to revolutionize the publishing of serial stories. You’ll see at the bottom of her post, she included an addendum about Amazon’s announcement.

For full details of Amazon’s announcement, you’ll want to check out this press release from the Wall Street Journal’s Market Watch. The upshot of this is that Amazon now has a new format specifically for serials which will allow readers to pay one flat fee and receive all installments of the story: past, present and future. It keeps reviews in one place and doesn’t clog up the reader’s kindle with multiple entries for the same story.

At the moment, Kindle Serials do not appear to be a self-publishing platform, although it does appear to bypass the role of the agent. Amazon’s submission guidelines provide no indication of how serials are evaluated, how many might be considered for publishing or any specifics. We hope that over time that will become more clear and of course we also hope that the platform becomes a self-publishing option.

As writers, publishers and everybody else try to figure out how Kindle Serials will work, there’s a lot of buzz about it on social media and the interwebs.

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on Tuesday Serial.

 

Kindle Singles and the Future of Ebooks

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This post, by Joe Wikert, originally appeared on his Digital Content Strategies blog on 10/21/13.

“Compelling ideas expressed at their natural length.” That’s Amazon’s tagline for their popular Kindle Singles program. And while Singles hasn’t exactly been a major industry disruptor I believe it lays the foundation for some of the bigger, bolder initiatives Amazon is planning for the future. I also believe it’s a model that will become much more common over time.

The formula looks like this:

1.End the practice of artificially puffing up content

The greatest aspect of Kindle Singles is, of course, their short length. The first one I read was a Single about media and I remember thinking how a typical business book editor would have asked the author to turn this 30-page gem into a bloated 300-page mess. It happens all the time and it’s a function of both physical shelf presence and perceived value. In the ebook world there’s suddenly no physical bookshelf an individual title has to have a spine presence on. Now we just need to stop equating “shorter” with “cheaper”…more on that in a moment.

2.Attention spans are shrinking

Face it. With very few exceptions you’re probably thrilled to read all this short-form content that didn’t exist 10 years ago. Blogs, no matter what they’re called, are very popular. Then came Twitter with its 140-character bursts of information. Let’s also not forget about all the other terrific short-form content services like Byliner that we’ve grown to love. Shortened content is also why The Week is such a popular magazine. Kindle Singles is just tapping into our desire to find the Cliff’s Notes on everything so that we can quickly read it and move on.

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on Digital Content Strategies.

 

Are #Indies Getting Clobbered by Big Name E-book Discounts?

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This post, by Toby Neal, originally appeared on her blog on 12/4/13.

I think we are. And, it’s a great time to be a reader and shopping for e-books!

The DOJ price-fixing case with Apple and the Big 5 publishers was settled awhile ago, but September was when Amazon began really discounting big name books. I get several email lists of discounted books daily in my inbox, and I’ve been agog to see big names like Janet Evanovich, Louise Perry, Michael Connelly, Patricia Cornwell and most recently, Donna Tartt’s Goldfinch, one of the Best Books of 2013, going for 2.99 or less.

I’ve bought more books than ever. More books than I should—but who can resist stockpiling these gems for a rainy reading day? I got the entire Game of Thrones set for around fifteen dollars! *goggle* If there’s ever a Zombie Apocalypse, I’ll be holed up in my bunker with all my ebook treasures, reading until the battery runs out!

Many of these have been older titles, but in preparing for Christmas, Barnes and Noble and Amazon seem to be pulling out all the stops and there’s no book whose price they won’t slash.

And in September, my sales went to half of what they’d been. They’ve stayed at half what they’d been in spite of doing active marketing, ads on Kirkus Reviews, giveaways, promos in those same lists I get in my email inbox, and launching two new books.

It’s like being the wimpy kid at the beach in that old commercial from the comics, getting sand kicked in your eye. Cheaper pricing was our advantage as indies.

I predicted this would happen in this blog post. In fact I’m surprised it took this long to happen. I’ve been asking around to other indies and they’re reporting similar dismal sales. So what can we do?

I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing, and diversify. Here are some ideas to try:

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on Toby Neal’s blog.

 

No, Mike Shatzkin did NOT say that publishing is spiraling down the drain

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This post, by Mike Shatzkin, originally appeared on his The Shatzkin Files blog on 11/21/13.

As part of the promotion of the Digital Book World conference, I do some interviewing with the very capable Jeremy Greenfield, the editor of their blog. And Jeremy takes our conversations and chops them up into short pieces around the themes of our show. Since the focus of Digital Book World is “how digital is changing publishing”, Amazon is a topic of great interest and one we try to address in an original and enlightening way.

In my interview with Jeremy, for which he published very brief but entirely accurate excerpts, I did say that publishers would face a real selling job with authors when Amazon’s share grows by another 25% from its current base or if Barnes & Noble closed. Neither of those things is likely to happen in the next few years. If and when the day comes that one of those things does happen, not all publishers would be entirely defenseless even with today’s arsenal of capabilities. And Jeremy’s piece closes with my suggestion that publishers can help themselves by doing “digital marketing at scale, which is audience-centric in its thinking.”

Despite how this is interpreted in some circles, it does not add up to publishing “spiraling down the drain”.

Amazon is already truly disruptive and it isn’t clear to anybody but those on the inside of Amazon exactly how disruptive. I’ve written earlier that we know nothing about the used book marketplace they host and foster, which we must assume cuts into sales, particularly of bestselling books which have many copies in circulation. A recent discussion on a mailing list I’m on revolved around what we don’t know about how many ebooks are being published. Why? Because Bowker, which issues ISBN numbers and therefore helps us count the titles going into the marketplace, doesn’t necessarily get to touch (and count) titles that stay entirely inside of Amazon and therefore only use the Amazon “ASIN” substitute for the ISBN. Other ebook retailers will handle titles without ISBN numbers, but only Amazon has a large enough market by itself to make a substantial number of self-publishers work with them alone.

And now we have the anomaly of sales reporting from the AAP, once again working without totally internal Amazon IP, that suggests ebook sales are going down. Are they going down? Or are self-published titles exclusively inside Amazon taking share away from the part of the business we can see and count for ourselves and masking the ebook sales growth that is actually taking place? I have no evidence, but that strikes me as a more likely reality than that ebook sales have actually fallen year-to-year recently.

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on The Shatzkin Files.