Lots of action and change happening in the publishing world. From the inside point of view of a writer trying to navigate the rough waters, it’s a mess. So let’s do some recapping of the latest kerfuffles!
Apple: It’s official. Apple lost in the Department of Justice case that accused the company, along with other publishing companies that had already dropped out, of conspiracy against Amazon for digital book pricing. According to the New York Times article, “A federal judge ruled on Wednesday that Apple had illegally conspired with five of the six biggest publishers to try to raise prices in the budding e-books market…”.
Barnes and Noble: I recently wrote about the decision by Barnes and Noble to stop producing the Nook Tablet. But there’s been more shake up in the leadership structure of the company that does not instill confidence in the company’s survival. While the Washington Post thinks that the stepping down of William Lynch as the CEO doesn’t mean the end to the bookstores, it does muddy the waters in terms of what exactly the company can and will do to not end up closed like its old extinct rival Borders.
Amazon: It’s unclear if the DOJ legal case means that Amazon will get some big shift in business or that its business practices just got legitimized by the courts. While the traditional publishing world has been portraying Amazon as the big bad wolf, what just happened was the courts just proved that it was the other way around as the publishing world tried to blow Amazon’s house down – and failed.
On an inside note from Amazon’s self-publishing world, there are a few things quietly happening that do point to how big of a bad wolf the company may be. Few may be aware of how Amazon creates algorithms so that books can be seen. From time to time, Amazon changes those algorithms, which in turn changes whose books are on top. Recently, Amazon added genre subcategories that are to help readers find specific genre books, so instead of having a book under just Fantasy, perhaps a book can be found under “Paranormal & Urban”. It helps with the searching, but could hurt a new author trying to get discovered.
The most recent change has been in how books are included in the Best Sellers lists. Rising star Elle Casey noticed the change as she watched her latest book Shine Not Burn climb up the charts. Casey noted in her blog the segregation of e-books out of the Books section into a Kindle Best Sellers list. What this does to self-publishing authors who mainly sell digital books over their available paperbacks is segregate them away from those books that sell well in physical form. In other words, there’s now a clearer separation between traditionally published books and self-published. It’s an interesting move for the company that just benefited from the recent case ruling, and one that while some readers call beneficial makes self-publishing authors take notice.
It’s never a dull moment keeping up with the publishing world. It should also be noted that the merger between Penguin and Random House is finalized, so the Big Six is now officially the Big Five. I know I’m not alone in my disappointment that they didn’t rename the merged company Random Penguin. For now, the best we can do is to keep watch on new movements and go purchase a book to read!
Tagged: Amazon, Amazon Kindle, Apple, E-book, Elle Casey, New York Times, Random House, Washington Post
Falls Into Writing 
“I know I’m not alone in my disappointment that they didn’t rename the merged company Random Penguin.”
That got a chuckle.. very funny and great peice
Thanks! Trying to find the mirth in the situation.
Before we’re burning Amazon at the stake over their algorithms, let’s remember that it’s not Amazon’s responsibility to promote a self-published author’s work. The marketing hat falls directly on the author’s own head to try to determine who they feel the audience for their book is and find ways to reach that audience, and not just rely too heavily on a few lines of computer code. Barnes & Noble, Target, Wal-Mart, or any other brick-and-mortar retailer isn’t going to put up a huge display of your book smack in a high-traffic area, either. You have to earn that.
As I understand it, there’s two ways to make the Amazon algorithm work for you as an author: the first is that people rate and review your book to boost it higher in the rankings, which means you need to have some way of pleading / asking that directly of them, whether that’s from a website / blog, social media, face-to-face at a signing or convention of some sort. Which means you have to have some connection with them outside of your name popping up on a ‘Recommended for you’ section of an Amazon webpage.
Second is that you have to have a fire and forget mentality and keep writing and publishing regardless how ‘well’ your earlier efforts sell. The more entries you have in the hat, the more likely your name is to get drawn out of it.
Amazon is doing new authors a favor by providing a means of publishing and distribution with very low up-front costs so that a newcomer can build up a body of work without taking out a second mortgage or job to pay off printing bills until they catch on with an audience, and providing a way for them to sell their work from a trusted retail platform, rather than trying to convince someone to give you their credit card info on a self-hosted, author-run website.
Not everyone is going to win the algorithm lottery and become an overnight success.
I agree with you in your points about Amazon and their algorithms. It is up to the self-publishing author to put out more well-written and edited works in order to build a reading audience.
My point in including Amazon’s recent changes is actually an observation of something that’s been noticed by many writers over the past year or so as Amazon has gained the spot as being the biggest and most successful self-publishing platform. When they make changes, it does affect where some writers end up. And it is traceable that getting that first attention from readers is indeed harder now then when Amazon first started their program.
You’re absolutely right about the sense of lottery and overnight success that many self-publishing authors desire as not being inherent or necessarily deserved. And it’s certainly not on Amazon’s head to cater to those authors. But how they change or add categories, how they change their system as to how books are seen or found is important to keep up with as, like you say, they are giving the “storefront” and ability for indie authors to publish.
Ultimately, I think your most important point is that even while keeping up with the publishing news whether it’s the big houses or Amazon, a writer has to keep on writing and working on getting the best books out there to represent themselves.
True. And I’m sure what adds to the speculation is that Amazon — nor anyone else who uses a similar algorithm-based system — is going to publicly discuss at length how the numbers get crunched, so more malicious types aren’t attempting to farm the numbers to their advantage with that knowledge.