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Mike Shatzkin: Agency pricing most dramatic publishing event of the year
November 30, 2010 | 2:50 pm
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By Chris Meadows
It’s the time of year when people and publications start making lists of things that happened during the rest of it, and Publishing Perspectives is kicking off a series on “the most dramatic events in publishing in 2010.” The first piece in the series is also posted at the website of its writer, publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin of IdeaLog.
Shatzkin’s pick for the most dramatic publishing event of 2010 is the confrontation between Amazon and five of the big six publishers early this year over bringing an end to Amazon’s $9.99 e-book pricing scheme. Even in theory, Shatzkin writes, the shift was complicated, involving as it did considerable changes to how prices and royalty were calculated. In practice it was even more so, due to a number of legal or economic issues. Literary agents had to be coddled, and one of the publishers, Random House, sidestepped the pricing scheme altogether.
The most dramatic single moment of this long-playing dramatic event was last January when Amazon made a brief, and vain, effort to stop the whole agency movement in its tracks by pulling the buy buttons for Macmillan, apparently because they were the first publisher to officially notify Amazon of the forthcoming change. The giant retailer retreated in about 48 hours marking the first time in anybody’s memory that the publishers had forced them to back down.
(Of course, even after they “retreated”, it still took about a week for the “buy” buttons to be restored.)
Shatzkin suggests that, in helping to prevent Amazon from entirely taking over the e-book market, agency pricing has achieved its main goal, but notes that publishers are going to have to rise to the challenge of hashing out a scientific approach to publishing. He also points out that currently the sales agent, Amazon, is the one who actually interacts with the customers and reaps the marketing benefits of that contact. “It might be pushing things to expect that dispute to begin with the next round of agency contract negotiations in 2011, but expect that issue to make its way to the table in 2012 or 2013.”
It is hard to think of anything more dramatic than this Amazon event earlier this year, which produced angry rhetoric from all sides, but there are at least a few contenders, all of which I expect to see hashed out in Publishing Perspectives articles. The introduction of the iPad, for one, and agent Andrew Wylie’s great backlist publishing announcement for another. This has been a year of great change in the publishing industry, perhaps more so than any other recent years. It will be interesting to see what comes next.
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I’m a science-fiction writer published by Tor (part of Macmillan), and seeing the “Buy” buttons disappear for my books on Amazon.com was disconcerting, to say the least. But it was also amazing to see the publishers actually take a stand and seem to actually have a vision of the future of publishing, too. I agree with Mike Shatzkin: hands down, this dramatic introduction of agency pricing was the top publishing story of 2010.
Say what you like about Amazon, the removing of the ‘buy’ buttons was a rather subtle backhand, and added a touch of elegant disdain to the whole scuffle.
I would agree it was the most newsworthy, but also the most stupid thing that happened this year in publishing.
It would be interesting to hear from authors about how the agency pricing model has actually increased their sales. I ask this because I spend approximately $500 on enjoyment reading and $250 on work reading materials per year. And when I look back on my purchasing habits, the agency pricing model has destroyed my practices. Before, about 60% of my purchases were from the agency publishers. Since it went in to effect, I have only bought ONE agency book. That’s a drop from 60% to about 2%.
As an author you might ask why this is. I can only say that almost all of the agency books are overpriced, often 4-5 dollars more expensive than the MMPB version of the same book. This is a slap in the face to long time loyal readers who basically support the entire publishing industry because we are voracious readers. Further, the one price for all is simply not true. If you use priceinfo or metabooks or any other price aggregator for ebooks, you find that even agency books are never the same price between retailers. I have never figured out why, but there is often 1-3 dollars difference with no explanation why. Definitely not a level playing field. The agency model has further hurt the most loyal readers by destroying the idea of rewards clubs. Depending on the system, the more books you bought, the more discounts you could use on other books. This leads to increased book sales overall and benefits everyone.
As a result, I have moved on to better reading pastures with more reasonable publishing platforms. It’s too bad because while I will probably miss a couple of authors who I liked and were part of the agency publishers, I have found many replacements who are keeping me happy.
In the end, all I can offer is a “best wishes” to Rob Sawyer – I have many of your books, but they are all pre-agency and no more will adorn my shelves or ereader again from the agency system.
Most dramatic … and the most anti Consumer and anti Reader event of the year. A vision of the future that turned out to be ‘greed greed greed’.
I’m with reader@work. Amazon might have temporarily removed the buy button but the agency price fixing has stopped me from buying from the big publishers completely. I read and enjoyed the first book of Robert J. Sawyer’s WWW trilogy so it’s not his writing or Amazon that have stopped me from buying the rest of the series. It’s the actions of his publisher.
Oh well lots of other good books to read. Lots of other things to buy with my money.