happy new year! 2011 is gonna be interesting... in retrospect, 2010 was a pivotal year for e-books... the contrast is about as stark as it could possibly be... *** here, on the one hand, we have the publishing industry. for them, the most significant development in e-books during 2010 was their enforcement of the "agency model". daunted by the deep-discounting offered by amazon.com, corporate publishers got apple to go with "agency pricing" -- where the retail price for a book is set by the publisher, and the retailer simply collects a 30% fee as its payment -- and 5 of the new york "big6" forced amazon to play along... (the holdout, random house, gets to enjoy the advantage of receiving payment based on its fictitious "list price" while it benefits from the big sales enabled by amazon's discounts, so their executives are now laughing all the way to the bank.) *** and, on the other hand, we have the "independent authors"... amazon extended the 70% "royalty" to independent authors, provided they priced their e-books between $2.99 and $9.99, and 2010 proved to be the year that the revolution happened. i've been waiting for authors to break out for _decades_ now, tirelessly seeking signs of life from that corner of the universe, and 2010 was when it happened. ground central for the broadcasts was the blog of j.k. konrath. konrath writes thrillers, and has had success as a midlist author. he'd been putting his books on his site -- as free e-books -- but some kindle owners asked him to post 'em on amazon too. amazon won't let an individual author post e-books for free, so he charged $.99 each, but the kindle people were happy to pay, just for the convenience of being able to download them easily. much to his surprise, konrath started making some real money. in december of 2009, he made $1,650. not a ton of money, no, but it was something. and it went up in january, because of all the people who'd received kindles as presents over the holidays. and it continued to mount as konrath put more of his backlist in the kindle store, and published a raft of new books for the kindle. so konrath blogged about it, and other authors heard his tune. month after month in 2010, konrath's amazon sales increased. and when amazon raised its rate to the 70%, his profit flew up. and those other authors, influenced by him, also started to get some substantial sales of their books, also increasing monthly, and their profit also stepped up significantly with the 70% rate. by the end of the year, the noise had turned into a groundswell. in december of 2010, konrath made $24,000. in just a month. all in all, his take for the year was about $200,000 -- a bundle. and it was not unheard of for other authors to match his sales. indeed, the occasional author made even more... one of the most extreme of these outliers was amanda hocking. amanda hocking was never involved in the publishing industry... before april 15th of this year, she'd never sold a book in her life. but she put some books she'd written on amazon and elsewhere, and she experienced a dizzying sales climb in them over the year, and this past _month_, she sold just over 100,000 copies of them.
http://amandahocking.blogspot.com/2010/12/pics-or-it-didnt-happen.html
that's a lot of profit for a kid who had an up-front cost of zero. and you can bet there are a truckload of authors who noticed... the corporate publishing companies will be solvent a long time. they are tucked into corporate parents with very deep pockets, and they are sitting on a goldmine of intellectual property that will continue to provide them with a cashflow for many decades. having said all of that, however, the developments of this past year have made it abundantly clear that -- as far as being a _necessary_ ingredient in the breaking of new authors _or_ the maintenance of midlist writers -- corporate publishers have been disintermediated. there's no way to put this genie back in the bottle... and with the breakdown of borders becoming ever more imminent, those same publishers are having problems on the retail end as well. it's not a good time to be taking a close look at their balance-sheets. *** so, while the corporate publishing industry tried its darndest to hang on to a dying business model during 2010, even at the cost of pricing e-books outside the comfort-range of the customers, independent authors stepped into the void and took advantage... 2010 was an earthquake. the book world will never be the same. -bowerbird p.s. one humorous aspect of this is that some people have started to demand "credit" because they "predicted' that this would happen a few years back. and thus i take great delight informing them that michael hart invented e-books 40 years ago, so they can stand in line.