Amazon, Crossings, and J. A. Konrath: Is This Week a "Game Changer"?

Sarah Weinman has a good post up at Daily Finance about two announcements this week from Amazon: first that they have made a deal to publish a new, original book by crime author J. A. Konrath in their Amazon Encores program, previously devoted to republishing older and out-of-print titles. Konrath, who has promoted his own work very effectively on the web and has blogged about how successfully he has sold his work at a very low price on Kindle, parted company with the trade house who had published his earlier books and now will sell his work directly through Amazon.  Weinman points out that, alongside the second announcement--that Amazon will start a wholly new publishing program called Crossings that will publish literature in translation (books formerly unavailable in the U.S.)--that the online retailing behemoth will now be competing directly with publishers, in an arena where Amazon has some powerful advantages. 

With an admirable trace of hesitation at trotting out the buzzword of 2010, Sarah calls these developments "game changing" and quotes the ever-brainy Mike Shatzkin in support of the statement. Meanwhile the also-savvy MJ Rose has a great post at her blog making a seemingly contrary statement: she says there are no game changers any more.  So has the game changed, or not? 

At the risk of saying "everybody's right," I have to take a different point of view: I agree with Weinman and Shatzkin that it's a momentous development if Amazon is really going to start competing head to head with publishers. They have already started picking off the backlist of major authors like Stephen Covey and Paulo Coelho, and if they are now going to get into the frontlist business things will get more interesting. But if you look at the larger picture, it's this: EVERYTHING is changing. So many elements of the industry as I've known it are in play that the one thing we can be sure of is, the game is going to be different five or ten years from now. But I think it's way too early to know whether this particular play of Amazon's is going to be decisive in their favor. Here are some things we don't know that will bear on the answer:

The market for books in translation (as Mike S. points out) has historically been pretty small. Can Amazon's retailing power make it much bigger? If not, the Crossings move may be less significant. 

Will Amazon really want to be in the editorial business? It's one thing to find worthy or marketable backlist titles or new books by authors who have proved themselves. Seeking works undervalued in the current marketplace--like translations--is a logical next step. But to truly compete with publishers, Amazon will need editors--people who find new books and attempt to choose ones that will connect with readers. This process is inherently unpredictable and therefore risky and inefficient--very different from their algorithm-driven business of selling existing books, even obscure "long tail" titles. I suspect Amazon Crossings will find, even with the company's unique ability to reach, say, "readers who bought French novels by women in translation," that some titles on their list do much better than others. 

How big a share of the e-book market can Amazon retain as e-readers proliferate? This question is complicated by the fact that you can read Kindle books on devices beside the Kindle, but whether authors are willing to give Amazon exclusivity on their e-books will surely depend on how much of the market they risk giving up.

Or, will Apple decide to compete with Amazon in the same way? The explosive growth of the iBooks store is going to give Apple similar power to Amazon's in presenting authors to readers. So far they have taken a very different approach, dealing only with the biggest publishers and a few aggregators. But they deal directly with thousands of suppliers in the App Store, and may well move in that direction once iBooks are well established.  

How will contract terms shift between authors and publishers in the coming years? Konrath points out that he makes more money self-publishing via Kindle for $2.99 a copy than he might have in a conventional print deal with a major house, Hyperion, at $14.99. If author/publisher deals evolve, as they are likely to, will the marketing and distribution power of a big publisher become less easy to give up? 

How many authors will be able to replicate Konrath's success at marketing himself? Amazon didn't pick Konrath to sign up just because of the quality of his writing. He has been a creative and assiduous promoter of his work, as Jason Pinter observes in a HuffPost piece. In my experience only handful of authors have the marketing savvy and drive Konrath has shown. If you're already a bestselling author, or a celebrity, you may not need Konrath's smarts. But the model that works for Konrath or Covey may not work for a majority of authors. (This of course still leaves the danger for publishers of Amazon creaming off the most profitable books at the top of the sales curve.) 

How will the role of agents affect the way all this unfolds? I'm not the first person to notice that if there's a danger to publishers in disintermediation, there's a real risk of it for agents too. If all an author needs to do to make $400 a day is upload titles to the Kindle store (as Konrath says he's doing), does she need an agent for that? There's a disincentive for agents to move toward a world where they can't auction projects to Random, Hachette et al. Will they push authors in a different direction, and how many authors will value their agents' advice more than the revenue the agents carve off the author's income? 

I realize I'm much better at asking questions on this blog than at giving answers. But my point here is that with the book marketplace in flux in so many different directions (the above are only a few), it's not even totally clear what "game" we're playing, much less whether even big news like this week's has "changed" it. 

Illustration: Matrix Chessboard, via Wikimedia Commons

The Doctor Is (Back) In

Dear Readers,

When I started this blog one of my motivations for doing it was that very few trade publishers or editors were actually on the web talking about what we do or how the book world looks from a publisher's perspective. Since that time I've become aware of one reason why: this blog-writing thing takes a lot of time! We do things in the office all day, and then go home to read and edit; somewhere in there we might see our spouses or children, but an editorial job tends to fill up a lot of hours that could otherwise be devoted to exciting activities like blogging, tweeting, and Facebooking. 

I keep hoping I will develop the skill of tossing off the pithy 100- or 150-word blog post like Seth Godin or Chris Brogan, but I seem to be doomed to crank out 300 or 800 word posts that take me hours to write (partly because I can't help myself--I edit them). All of which is a longwinded excuse for the hiatus since my last post. It wasn't that I got lost in the ash cloud on the way home from London--I got submerged in the manuscript pile. I'm happy to say that the manuscripts I neglected this blog to edit over the last several weeks--one on the Pythagorean Theorem, one on health care reform, and one on the morality of animals--were all terrific books that I can't wait to see in print. But I will save writing about those until they get closer to a bookstore near you. Meanwhile I will do my best to resume posting at a regular, not-quite-blistering pace. There is much to discuss, from the mysteries of flap copy to the latest maneuvers in the e-book world and question of whether this week's developments are really "game changing." 

Yours very truly,

Dr. S. 

Planes, Trains, Automobiles, and Boats, or, How I Got to the London Book Fair

So you've probably heard about the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull, 

which has led to the cancellation of all transatlantic flights leaving travellers stuck all over the U.S. and Europe and prevented hundreds of foreign publishers from getting to the London Book Fair, which starts today.  Your correspondent, however, is not easily deterred. Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor airborne particles of sulfurous ash and jet-destroying silicates was going to keep me from schmoozing my colleagues from Britain and elsewhere. Undaunted, I set off on Friday from my office in  the Flatiron

for JFK Airport. There, I boarded a plane for Dublin. This was the flight I had originally booked weeks before--not because I am amazingly prescient, but because I got a cheap ticket on an airline I like, Aer Lingus. The leprechauns were with me, because I took what I believe was the last flight to reach Europe that evening. (A later flight to Dublin got halfway and was turned back.) An Aer Lingus official told me they couldn't promise any flights beyond Dublin--but friends in Edinburgh, my next stop, told me Scottish airports were open as of Friday afternoon.

So they were--but by the time I landed in Dublin Saturday morning, Irish airspace was closed and all flights across Europe were cancelled.  The airport was full of long snaking queues of befuddled travelers. (I must say that airline staff were extremely courteous, and almost every traveler around me displayed remarkable patience in a situation that was obviously unlooked-for by everyone.)

I went to Plan B, and booked the next non-cancelled flight to Edinburgh (the next morning). But that seemed dicey, so it was time for Plan C: the ferry from Dublin across the Irish Sea and train to London. The problem with Plan C was that I couldn't confirm on the internet that there were train tickets available--I was far from the only traveler who thought of the ferry solution. But my friends in Scotland told me there was a ferry from Belfast to the Scottish coast, and volunteered to pick me up at the dock (above and beyond the call of duty, since their house looks out on the Firth of Forth--the other coast of Scotland). Thus was launched Plan D.

I got into Dublin and caught the train to Belfast with enough time for breakfast--coffee was what made this journey possible. From Belfast Central, a taxi to the port, where I boarded the ferry to Stranraer. From there, Michael and Jane whisked me cross country to Edinburgh.

And this morning, after a blessedly civilized evening and a delicious night's sleep,  I hopped the train from Edinburgh's Waverly Station to London. 

I confess I actually enjoyed my trip. It was a beautiful weekend to be traveling around Ireland, Scotland, and England, and by the end of it, I felt like Phileas Fogg.  All that was missing from the adventure was a hot-air balloon. 

Tomorrow, I'll be at Earl's Court Exhibition Centre for the Book Fair, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and hoping to scoop up an armful of bestsellers that my fellow Americans aren't around to see. 

Then I just have to figure out how to get home.

(all photos via Wikimedia Commons. In the train photo I have taken a liberty: I did not ride the Flying Scotsman steam train. But Phileas Fogg would have. ) 

Alice Goes Down Rabbit Hole, Pops Up on iPad

As readers here know I still have some doubts about how desirable "enhanced" e-books are going to be. Nonetheless, as with any medium, innovative people will use platforms like the iPad to create some nifty new content (whether that content is really "books" is another question). One of the most delightful things I have seen amid the iPad frenzy is this specially adapted version of Alice in Wonderland, which is now available as a separate app in the App Store.

This may not be as satisfying for a first-time reader as simply sitting with the old-fashioned printed book--but if you know the book and love Tenniel's illustrations, as I do, seeing them come to life in this way is a new sort of pleasure.

Haven't yet got my hands on an iPad long enough to do any reading, but I will soon, and will give the obligatory report on it as a reading device.

Update: Interesting article by one of Alice for iPad's creators here, on how they did it.  And several other children's books for iPad are already on the market--featured in this CNET article.