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| Hearsay: |
Moby was pointing to this piece about an apparently famous agent saying we need to change a few things.
“Real books aren’t going to disappear. The Kindle bestseller list contains contemporary novels of all sorts, but books that appear on the list are thrillers like James Patterson’s, which are sheer entertainment, and also romance novels. These are books that people want to read but don’t necessarily want to have a copy in their library. If you read a book on a Kindle or a Sony Reader, and you decide that you love it and you want a copy of it at home, you can buy it.”
Another issue that concerns her is book pricing: Amazon is breaking the market, she says.
“Amazon prices books at $9.99. Books in hardback cost $30.00, and the stores give a discount and the price goes down to $15.00. Amazon is not regulated the way retail outlets are, so they can do whatever they want.”
So they might wipe out the publishers. Are you fighting them?
“They can definitely wipe out the publishers. The problem is that the publishers need them. Amazon isn’t an easy company to do business with. It’s a very secretive company; they will not share any of their sales data.”
Are signs of the shaky economy already evident in your deals? Is it getting harder to get large advances?
“I think it will start affecting authors’ advances, and I think authors’ advances will become more in line with what their actual sales are. And that’s probably a good thing – we are just selling fewer books. The whole business needs adjustment.”
Altogether, she adds, “Too many books are being published in the states today, and all of them are in hardcover at ridiculous prices.
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February 25th, 2009 at 10:28 am
I read this piece yesterday, and the part that hit me in the gut was this: “So fewer books will be published, and those whom we call midlist writers will no longer get published. The major writers will keep publishing, debut books will always be published, and the ones in the middle will have a problem.”
You can already see this happening with all the POD publishing companies being formed. There will be a two tiered system, with the annointed at the top, and every body else part of the broad lower level, publishing their books on POD/vanity presses, absolutely no promotional money, selling their measely two or three dozen copies a year. It’s pathetic but I think it’s inevitable, given all the trends (corporate collapses, growing numbers of authors, dwindling numbers of readers, the internet and POD capabilities. Time to take the gas pipe, perhaps?
February 25th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
Well, since books existed before Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Wal-Mart I think we’re going to be OK in the end regardless.
The problem is not that books will disappear, just that the current model of doing the book business will disappear. So don’t worry Elmo, we’ll still be able to play.
Writers, just like actors, tax collectors and prostitutes will always be around…and someone will pay for our services.