Amazon’s moves into publishing business cause traditional publishers to feel threatened

The New York Times is carrying a piece about how Amazon is moving to act as a combined publisher/retailer, cutting out traditional publishers. The company already tried to snag a series by self-publishing prodigy Amanda Hocking, offering the largest advance of any publisher in the auction, but lost out due to fears that competing bookstores might not carry Amazon-published books.

But it looks as if those fears are not stopping writers such as actress and director Penny Marshall, who an anonymous source claims has scored an $800,000 advance for an autobiography. And Amazon is reportedly trying to woo established authors away from their publishers, as well.

“Everyone’s afraid of Amazon,” said Richard Curtis, a longtime agent who is also an e-book publisher. “If you’re a bookstore, Amazon has been in competition with you for some time. If you’re a publisher, one day you wake up and Amazon is competing with you too. And if you’re an agent, Amazon may be stealing your lunch because it is offering authors the opportunity to publish directly and cut you out.

“It’s an old strategy: divide and conquer,” Mr. Curtis said.

For its part, Amazon essentially compares publishers to Chicken Little, saying that they are constantly predicting the end of the world, and that the publishing landscape is truly changing for the first time since Gutenberg invented the printing press. Amazon, meanwhile, is offering additional services to authors that they may not get from publishers, including direct access to Nielsen BookScan sales data for printed books.

The article closes with a couple of case studies, looking at the story of Kiana Davenport (which we also covered), in which Penguin canceled publication of a novel due to her self-publication of short story collections via Amazon, and at Laurel Saville, whose memoir about her mother sold poorly self-published but attracted Amazon’s attention enough to revise and republish.

Ms. Saville no longer even contemplates a career with a traditional publisher. “They had their shot,” she said. She is now writing a novel. “My hope is Amazon will think it’s wonderful and we’ll go happily off into the publishing sunset,” she said.

Of course, even if it doesn’t, she could still self-publish it via Amazon Kindle and get 70% of the revenue.

I will be very interested to see how Amazon’s publishing operations turn out, and how competing stores declining to carry Amazon’s books turns out to affect their sales. My suspicion is that it might harm the stores more than it harms Amazon, causing prospective purchasers to turn to Amazon to buy the books they want when their bookstores don’t carry them—and perhaps causing them to look at buying other books they want from Amazon, too.