It saddens me that there is an entire generation that will grow up not remembering life before Amazon, specifically, a life of independent bookshops. The ghosts that still inhabit our high streets are now little more than commercially-driven prostitutes for the big publishers.
The recent revelation of J.K. Rowling taking a low-key pseudonym in order to escape the fervent hype that surrounds her output, brought out stories of other authors who had resorted to such measures. Despite having successfully published other novels, large publishers were unwilling to gamble on a new author of clear talent.
The books that are promoted the most, unsurprisingly sell the most, and publishers are increasingly throwing their weight behind smaller numbers of titles rather than spread-betting, hoping for a massive return on the next Harry Potter. Independent bookshops have almost disappeared from our towns, largely due to the influence of online retailers such as Amazon. However, is Amazon about to be the saving grace for the literati?
It’s no secret that the Kindle has divided readers. There are those who love its portability and privacy, whilst others revile its proprietary DRM content and the undercutting of smaller bookstores. Yet Amazon now has another market to corner beyond sales of printed and electronic content. Now, Amazon is about to take on the publishing market, extending its foothold into distribution and production. Previously, self-published authors found that large companies owned the presses, and were prepared to charge over 80% of profit for their use. Therefore, these self-published works were largely reserved as vanity projects for the rich.
Amazon offers authors the opportunity to sell their work directly through the Kindle with a 70% royalty return, providing the book costs below a certain amount. Amounts above that receive 35%, which sounds like a large drop until you consider that an author’s royalties through a large scale publisher are closer to 17.5%. The jump is motivated by Amazon’s need to keep the Kindle competitive, which when considering the lower price of Kindle books in comparison with published print editions, still benefits the author.
Let’s face it – competition does more than just change the prices of goods, it affects the quality of the output. In a market where publishers are looking to capitalise on the sale of already successful editions, there is no longer the impetus to find new and distinctive works. In that way, the market can be seen to be getting narrower.
However, through Amazon’s scheme, everyone has a chance to have their work judged without the publishers effectively running a protection racket on their investment. It also encourages equality between provider and seller, rather than new authors signing their lives away for the sake of that aspirational publishing deal they have dreamed of for years.
Whilst I will never forget those first tentative steps into a public library, or into a small bookshop now long boarded up, I cannot help but feel a level of optimism. We can’t pretend that the cry of the big publishers that Amazon has readers in a death-grip is anything other than disingenuous. They, after all, have controlled content for years in the same manner, and inflated the price of books to a luxury rather than a solace for the soul. This only hurts the quality of what we read and the way in which we are viewed as a consuming public.
The lowest common denominator is dictating the bottom line for all of us. And I can’t help but feel that Amazon, the Goliath of books, struck a deal for us Davids without casting a stone.