The Continually Changing Face of Publishing

• First, Amazon is unique in that it has access to the biggest reader database in existence. Not only do they know buying habits, but they have millions of email addresses. As proven by their recent invention “deal of the day” they can place any title in the top 10 anytime they want to and this can mean a pretty big spotlight at any time. This is a good thing for Amazon-published authors.
  
• Second, they have instituted exclusivity practices that limit the distribution of their author’s titles. In particular, if you are published through Amazon your ebooks won’t show up in the ibookstore or Barnes and Noble or anywhere else. To maximize sales you want to make it easy for people to buy your books and cutting out entire segments of the marketplace doesn’t help the author. I realize why Amazon is doing this…and it might turn out the best thing for their authors (high concentration in one place rather than diluted sales) but all in all I think this is very bad for the author.
  
• Third, no bookstore presence. Yeah, I know…bookstores are closing…they aren’t as important as they once was…I get it. But the fact remains there are still a ton of sales sold through stores and for some authors they won’t consider themselves a “real author” until they see the books on a shelf at their local B&N. Originally it was the indie bookstores that banned Amazon produced books. But now Barnes and Noble and Books-a-Million have instituted similar bans. Originally my thought was… “If a book is a bestseller they’ll have it for sale.” Now I’m not so sure. They are drawing battle lines and I don’t think exceptions will be made. This is terrible for authors who signed on with Amazon with the promise that they’ll have both print and ebooks. Sure, they’ll still sell books online…and that is a large number of books but in many respects I think the selling point of going with a publisher is widespread distribution. Since Amazon authors don’t get this it helps to put them in a different category.