The Shatzkin Files
The year ends with a front-page New York Times story reporting the consternation in the indie author community at the current state of their commercial lives at Amazon. The proximate cause of distress is seen to be the Amazon Kindle Unlimited subscription service, through which indie authors are receiving considerably less compensation per read than they get through a sale, combined with the apparent migration of many Kindle readers to subscription, which would also explain the simultaneous sharp decline in those authors’ single-copy sales. Indie author and author service-provider Bob Mayer is quoted in the piece describing a complete turnaround in the past six months, with authors going from what they thought were secure incomes from writing to looking for day jobs.
Nate Hoffelder at Digital Reader makes the point that we’d want to know whether it is just the indie authors feeling this pain or whether publishers are seeing revenues shrink too. But that’s a very difficult comparison to make. Amazon gets the attractive books from the big non-agency publishers by just buying them for each use (paying whatever is the publisher’s wholesale price). Amazon wins that way because they don’t have to get the publisher’s permission to participate in the subscription program, but they’re paying a lot more for each subscriber read than they pay the indies. So even if the reader balance shifts from “individual purchase” to subscription read”, the publisher wouldn’t lose income.
My hunch is that the indie author community has a much more serious and intractable problem. It’s called supply and demand.
What a long list of indie authors has proven in the years since Kindle was invented is that there is a substantial market willing to try storytelling from unknown writers if it is offered at a relatively low price. As a result of that and of Amazon — joined by all the other ebook platforms and a legion of service-providers like Bob Mayer — making it relatively easy to “publish” a manuscript, many tens of thousands of authors have published hundreds of thousands of ebooks that way.
What is now being proven is that market is not infinitely elastic. Most of the data we see suggest that ebook sales growth has stopped. (As Mayer says in the piece, many ebook readers have an inventory of ebooks they’ve bought and not yet read.) Ever-growing supply and stable demand is a toxic formula for the prospects of each successive ebook published for that market. My own hunch is that Kindle Unlimited is simply the straw that broke the camel’s back.
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Nate Hoffelder at Digital Reader makes the point that we’d want to know whether it is just the indie authors feeling this pain or whether publishers are seeing revenues shrink too. But that’s a very difficult comparison to make. Amazon gets the attractive books from the big non-agency publishers by just buying them for each use (paying whatever is the publisher’s wholesale price). Amazon wins that way because they don’t have to get the publisher’s permission to participate in the subscription program, but they’re paying a lot more for each subscriber read than they pay the indies. So even if the reader balance shifts from “individual purchase” to subscription read”, the publisher wouldn’t lose income.
My hunch is that the indie author community has a much more serious and intractable problem. It’s called supply and demand.
What a long list of indie authors has proven in the years since Kindle was invented is that there is a substantial market willing to try storytelling from unknown writers if it is offered at a relatively low price. As a result of that and of Amazon — joined by all the other ebook platforms and a legion of service-providers like Bob Mayer — making it relatively easy to “publish” a manuscript, many tens of thousands of authors have published hundreds of thousands of ebooks that way.
What is now being proven is that market is not infinitely elastic. Most of the data we see suggest that ebook sales growth has stopped. (As Mayer says in the piece, many ebook readers have an inventory of ebooks they’ve bought and not yet read.) Ever-growing supply and stable demand is a toxic formula for the prospects of each successive ebook published for that market. My own hunch is that Kindle Unlimited is simply the straw that broke the camel’s back.
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