The New York Times is reporting Friday about a “battle”
between Amazon and 900 writers. The story
*by David Streitfeld) reports that Amazon is “discouraging” readers from buying
books from Hachette (whose most familiar imprints are probably Grand Central
Publishing and Little Brown). The story
(link here ) discusses the situation of Douglas Preston who, (like Stephen King) lives in
coastal Maine. But I just checked
Preston’s page on Amazon and found the books priced in an average way, with the
newest book “The Lost Island: A Gideon Crew Novel” sold for free on Kindle, but
older books variably priced. When I look
a second time, I see that Amazon offers a “free preview” (even chapters) and over
600,000 titles “free” to subscribers.
The article goes into efforts by Hachette to get higher prices for
Kindle titles than Amazon is willing to support. Publisher’s Weekly has a story here By the way, a promotional campaign for my
most recent book from the would have cost about $15000, a bit over-scaled for
me.
Preston seems to be playing ring leader of “Authors United”,
which has a letter to “our readers” here.
I’m not sure that what I see online myself
comports with this letter. The letter
mentions refusal to discount books. The
group will take out a full page ad on Sunday in the New York Times, as it stays
now. These are writers who actually make a living at it, and they feel caught
in the middle between two conflicting business models.
I’m not exactly in this group, where some of the material
seems to be genre fiction. (Oh, I have
enjoyed some of it in the past, like Sidney Sheldon (“If Tomorrow Comes”, “Rage
of Angels”, and “The Other Side of
Midnight”. (Dean Koontz had a horror movie in 1985 called just "Midnight" and it was a corker.) To sell paperback “potboilers” like
these in supermarket lines (or in commissaries) you have to make yourself
popular. Sheldon certainly could create
a wide range of characters.
Self-publishing companies price their books high (although
some of the Kindles are very low). Then
they offer volume discounts to sell back to authors, as if authors could
compete in retail selling with Amazon (and run their own credit card
operations, in these days of Vladimir Putin’s hackers).
But Hachette seems to own “it’s authors”. Doesn’t sound too healthy.
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