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The Amazon/Macmillan blow-up: An e-book lover’s appeal for understanding
February 6, 2010 | 12:59 am
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By Chris Meadows
Update: Tobias Buckell has linked to this piece, too. Thanks for the follow-up and the kind words, Tobias! And welcome to all the readers who come here from there!
Over the last few days, the angry Amazon/Macmillan rhetoric has been flying fast and furious from several positions. Recently, we posted an impassioned piece by Ficbot with the attention-grabbing headline, “Maybe we should be hurting the authors,” which was linked in a post on author Tobias Buckell’s blog and has brought us a great deal of traffic today (not to mention the liveliest comment thread we’ve seen in some time).
There seems to be a perceptual disconnect, or maybe several perceptual disconnects, between the authors/publishers on one side and the e-book readers on the other. There are many voices on both sides, both reasonable and less so—and to each side, the loudest voices on the other side become that other side’s entire argument.
And so we have on one side e-book fans absolutely convinced that publishers and authors unjustly hate them (or worse, don’t care at all). And on the other, there are writers who plaintively wonder, “How did the American public get hoodwinked into believing that the suppliers are the bullies rather than the retailers?”—and some who actively belittle the e-book fans.
It’s the kind of misunderstanding that makes it so, so seductive to write a response, because “someone is wrong on the Internet” and you’re just sure that if you make that one more post, say that one more thing, you’ll get through to them somehow. You know beyond any doubt that you’re right, and you’re sure they’d agree too except they’re just misunderstanding you, and you have to make them understand.
I’m halfway afraid that this post is going to be just another iteration of that. But all the same, I’m going to try to unpack some of the issues on the readers’ side and explain why this issue is so incendiary for long-time e-book fans.
One of the biggest misunderstandings is that this is all an overreaction to Macmillan taking “perfectly justified” steps to avoid Amazon monopolizing the e-book market and driving everyone else out of business. That’s part of it, but it’s actually just the smallest part of why most readers are so mad—the straw that broke the camel’s back.
“Let Them Eat Cake”
Part of the problem, and perhaps the part that made it blow up fastest, has been some of the rhetoric coming out of the other side.
From Macmillan’s side, with John Sargent’s ads/open letters, it’s a classic case of corp-speak right of the original Cluetrain Manifesto. Sargent addresses his letters to “authors, illustrators, and literary agents.” He says, “Amazon has been a valuable customer for a long time, and it is my great hope that they will continue to be in the very near future.”
E-book fans, dedicated readers, comb through his letters for any reference to themselves—and find none. The letter is not meant for them; it does not mention them. There is no other open letter from Sargent that is meant for them.
Amazon is addressed as Macmillan’s “customer,” rather than a distributor or retailer. Consequently, it becomes a lot easier for e-book fans, the people who feel they should be considered the publisher’s customers, to believe the publisher simply doesn’t give a damn about them.
Then there are some of the authors siding with Macmillan in discussions of the situation. In particular, there is one who is loudest among them: John Scalzi. Now, I greatly admire Scalzi’s writing, and have several of his books. I even like much of his blogging.
But Scalzi has shown a consistent pattern of behavior in his comment threads: when someone brings up concerns from a reader’s perspective that contradict his point of view, he responds with sarcasm rather than any serious attempt at dialogue. Now, granted, some of these people are nothing but rude, but even the polite ones get this treatment.
Neither of these is necessarily something on which to base a rational argument, but emotionally they’re a sure goad. It’s as if they’re smirking, “Let them eat cake.” It’s hard to blame e-book lovers for jumping up on the barricades and yelling, “Viva le revolution!” in response. Nobody likes to be told they don’t matter; it’s infuriating.
But as I said, this is only the straw that broke the camel’s back. In fact, many e-book lovers feel they have been told they don’t matter for more than ten years now.
A Long Time Ago, in an E-Book Store Far, Far Away
E-books have been sold by eReader and Fictionwise—first separately, then as part of the same store, then as part of Barnes & Noble—for over ten years. Over that time, e-book fans have seen a consistent, systematic pattern of missed opportunities and mishandling by publishers who seemed either not to care about or to actively despise e-books.
The books are wrapped up in restrictive DRM. They are often rife with typographical errors—errors which one ex-eReader employee said the e-book companies are not even permitted to correct (or at least weren’t when he worked for eReader), as they are contractually required to publish the book the way it came to them!
Many of the most egregious of these errors never get fixed. Even the Lord of the Rings series had them, and some feel they only bothered to fix those because it was such a popular book. (Trying to get errors fixed but having her requests fall on deaf ears is one of the issues that led to Ficbot’s immense frustration.) “Pirated” e-books are sometimes better-made than “legitimate” ones, because the “pirates” actually care about quality!
Often books in a series are published haphazardly, or not available in particular formats. Their pricing is inconsistent with print editions (more on that in a minute). And in the last year or so, the e-book stores have suddenly started enforcing geographic restrictions on e-book purchases on top of that, leaving many of their former best customers (such as Ficbot, who lives in the UK Canada) fuming.
And this has been going on for as long as these stores have existed.
The Price is Wrong
One of the biggest issues relating to e-books is the issue of price. It’s a thorny issue because it’s actually several issues at once, and even e-book enthusiasts often conflate the issues themselves.
The biggest issue that it is not about, despite some people yelling about it, is the popular slogan, “E-books have zero marginal cost to produce, therefore they should be much cheaper than paper books!”
Many e-book fans do believe this—in fact, it’s one of their great rallying cries against publishers, who they see as The Man who wants to keep them down. It’s probably not as true as most adherents think, but it doesn’t really matter in this argument because most of the people who believe it think even $9.99 is too much to pay for an e-book, so they would have been upset no matter what Macmillan did.
A related matter is the idea that e-books should be cheaper than paper books because you can’t do as much with them. I won’t argue with that idea, but how much cheaper is a matter of debate even among the people who agree in principle.
For some, a $15 e-book might be enough of a discount off of a full-price hardcover to make it worthwhile. Others will point out you can generally get discounted real hardcovers from the same place for the same amount. Again, it doesn’t really matter too much because in the end, those who think it costs too much just won’t buy it. But they sure do like to complain, don’t they?
No, the biggest issue is a matter of trust, and it has to do with Macmillan’s plan to implement variable pricing.
A Matter of Trust
Many people on Macmillan’s side are assuming irate consumers are just mad at suddenly having to pay $15 instead of $10. (It doesn’t help that some of them are mad for that reason, and even those not primarily motivated by it are not exactly pleased about it.)
These Macmillan partisans might point out that hardcovers cost more not because of their inherent hardcoverness—they may seem sturdier, but they don’t cost appreciably more than paperbacks to produce—but because they’re the earliest way to get the book.
“Why, then,” they might ask, “shouldn’t e-books be the same way? Even Baen sells its E-ARCs at $15 for the first three months, after all. Macmillan’s just going to do the same kind of thing with its new-release e-books—and will end up coming down to even less than $9.99 after a while. Is that really such a bad thing?”
On the face of it, the logical answer would be no, indeed that isn’t such a bad thing. $14.99, while not the psychologically tempting $9.99, is still at least five to ten bucks less than a hardcover. If you don’t want it at $14.99, you can just wait until the price drops, just as you’d wait to buy a paperback if shelling out for a hardcover didn’t appeal to you.
But the reason this is likely to send a lot of e-book fans off into incoherent rage is that it doesn’t take into account the history of e-books before Amazon came along.
Publisher Price Control…In Theory
For as long as eReader and Fictionwise have been selling them, even back when eReader called itself Peanut Press, the pricing on e-books has never been consistent at the smaller e-book stores.
The agency model might be new to Amazon, but at least one person holds that Fictionwise has always worked under such a model, where the publishers set the prices of their books. On the other hand, someone who works for Macmillan says they don’t, so I don’t know what to think.
Regardless, I definitely remember hearing in long-gone conversations with store employees that under their arrangement, publishers were supposed to drop the prices on e-books to maintain parity with the least expensive print format. When a hardcover goes to paperback, the price of the e-book should drop accordingly.
But somehow, it quite frequently never ended up happening. I no longer have URLs or exact references to point to—they’re probably still buried in the E-Book Community Mailing List archives if anyone wants to trawl through them for proof—but I seem to remember from the aforementioned conversations a consensus that it was like pulling teeth to get publishers ever to re-adjust their prices.
Invariable Pricing
This hasn’t changed much in ten years. Yesterday, to prove a point, I searched on different price ranges of Macmillan books at Fictionwise. I discovered that only 285 (about 15%) of the 2032 Macmillan titles on Fictionwise are priced at $9.99 or less. 857 (about 40%) are priced at $19.99 and up.
I then surveyed each of the 25 titles on the first page of $19.99+ search results, checking against print editions in on-line bookstores and determined that 7 out of those 25 were available as $7 to $9 mass market paperbacks. (See the link above for specific details.)
If I assume it’s a valid random sample and cross-multiply, 7/25 = 240/857. That would mean 240 of Macmillan’s titles—over 10% of their entire Fictionwise line—would be mispriced—or as I like to put it, “invariably priced”—in relation to their paper versions.
My gut feeling is that’s actually a lowball guess; some of the books on that first search were obviously just-added titles they were trying to push so I suspect there was a higher-than-average number of newer, hardcover books than usual—there’s no way that a publisher is going to keep 30% of its entire back catalog exclusively available in hardcover. And that does not take into account titles priced between $19.99 and paperback range, or ones from other publishers.
There are probably thousands of “invariably" priced books on Fictionwise now. And there always have been.
Conspiracy Theories
Are these mispricings simply a matter of the publishers not caring enough to keep them updated, or because of the bureaucracy required to get each price updated? In at least one case, it has been confirmed that “invariable pricing” is intentional on the part of the publisher: someone from Digital Mac said that $14 is the “correct” price of an e-book of a book that has been out in $7.99 paperback for several years. No explanation available yet.
This “invariable pricing” is perhaps the most bitter pill for e-book fans to swallow. Is it just neglect? Misunderstanding the market? Intentionally sabotaging e-books to protect the print market? Who knows?
The human mind looks for patterns; that’s why we see shapes in clouds. It’s also why conspiracy theories are so popular. It’s much more satisfying to believe that the publishers are out to get you than it is to believe they’re apathetic or just clueless. But even some published authors believe that publishers want e-books to fail.
And of course, someone not aware of how much of this frustration has built and festered over the last ten years will just assume those people have gone off the deep end.
Flashpoint
So in Fictionwise and eReader, you have e-book stores full of $26 e-books of $7 paperbacks. Now suddenly Amazon comes along, and you can suddenly buy $10 e-books of $26 hardcovers. Is it so hard to see why so many e-book fans so passionately embraced it, even with the DRM and restrictive terms and geographical restrictions and typographical errors?
It was because, finally, someone “got” e-books. They knew e-books were “supposed” to be cheaper than paper books. And, perhaps more importantly, they’re selling them cheaply to them.
It didn’t matter that Amazon was selling them below cost, or trying to build up a monopoly, or anything like that. E-books that were “supposed to be” $26 were instead $10. E-books that were “supposed to be” $7—well, I haven’t had time to research to see if they’re $7 or $10, but I suspect that even if they weren’t $7, $10 would still have been a lot better price than the $26 the publishers made Fictionwise charge.
And this is the world that Apple marched into with its agency pricing scheme, and the ominous declaration that, even though the books were going to be $13 to $15, the prices would be “exactly the same as in Amazon”. And then Macmillan made its ultimatum and Amazon pushed the button.
There’s been a lot of noise since then, about price-fixing, monopolies, loss leaders, and so on. Macmillan partisans complained about Macmillan books being pulled from Amazon (except for used copies which didn’t earn them anything). E-book fans complained about Macmillan blackmailing Amazon. Macmillan partisans called e-book fans entitled crybabies, and e-book fans called Macmillan partisans greedy profiteers.
Some e-book fans (including me) have been upset because the agency model amounts to resale price maintenance, a form of price-fixing that is inherently anti-competition and thus anti-consumer. Some Macmillan partisans have responded that Amazon was misusing its size advantage to monopolize the market. The flamewar continues.
But I suspect that all of these issues would largely go away, or at least become largely unimportant to most e-book fans, if it were not for that matter of trust I’ve been talking about.
Trust Busting
The heart of the matter is that Macmillan now claims it, and other publishers, want to implement variable pricing.
Make no mistake: if they could, it would be a great thing. As Baen has shown, $15 isn’t necessarily too much to pay for an e-book if you must have it right now (though given that Baen’s $15 “e-ARCs” won’t have print versions available in libraries or sit-and-read bookstores at the time they’re being sold (they’ll have fallen to $6 by then) and Macmillan’s e-books will, I suspect Macmillan won’t sell as many).
Others can wait until the price comes down, just as they do if they’d rather buy a paperback than a hardcover. By and large, we want to give publishers and authors our money—but a fair amount, not paying through the nose.
The problem is that e-book fans look at the ten-year history of invariable pricing at eReader and Fictionwise and doubt Macmillan can be trusted to do it.
Some of these skeptics believe Macmillan is outright lying and planning to destroy e-books by “discovering” nobody wants to buy them at $15 so there must not be a market after all (that “conspiracy theory” idea again), and others doubt Macmillan’s competence rather than its motives—but either way, it amounts to the same thing. If Macmillan couldn’t get its act together in ten years, why does anybody think it can be trusted to do so now?
Over at Making Light, Bruce Baugh thinks that it can because Amazon is a whole different ball game:
Fictionwise says they move about 16,000 volumes a month. Amazon moves…just a few more than that. It’s worth a publisher’s while to make something routine given the extra volume, and I would be slow to take their behavior with regard to a really niche venture as indicative of how they’d like to deal with the single largest sales point in the whole market.
On Tobias Buckell’s blog, Ed Greaves suggests,
It’s a perceptual disconnect. I’ve read several good blog posts about how that’s the silliest idea in the world, that publishers know that ebooks are the future, and they want to get into them, but that the current miasma is causing nothing but chaos. I believe that.
Still, even if Macmillan does come through with variable pricing, I’m a little worried that maybe Macmillan will implement it for Amazon…but it still won’t be worth the time to do it for Fictionwise and eReader, which will keep on selling those $26 paperbacks until they go out of business altogether. I rather hope not, as that’s where I buy most of my books.
Conclusion
So in the end, we have a great deal of anger and frustration on the side of e-book enthusiasts—perhaps as much from not being understood as from the pricing and other quality issues relating to e-books. As a comment from “Thiago” this morning put it:
I’m amazed at how surprised most authors seem to be by the anger of ebook readers, as if it is something that started from the Macmillan/Amazon feud. The fact is ebook readers are mad at Macmillan (and other publishers) for its general mishandling of ebooks (delays in releasing, gaps in series, the general lack of titles, the “variable” pricing and much more) for quite some time now, time during which they have essentially ignored these consumers. The apparent cluelessness of authors on these issues seems to imply authors themselves were just as ignorant.
And in Ficbot’s case, add “geographic restrictions” and “unresponsive customer service” on top of that. It isn’t any wonder that she and others on Mobileread are turning to the one-star “nuclear option”—they feel they’ve already tried just about everything else, and it is the only way they can think of to get attention. (On the bright side, it is at least less destructive than egging cars or painting graffiti.) Maybe authors don’t have a lot of influence over publishers, but if the stores and publishers are powerless to do anything, who else is left?
I’m not sure what the solution is, if there even is one. This whirlwind is made up of ten years of publisher-sown wind (or perhaps more accurately “hot air”). The Macmillan partisans who seem puzzled by the intensity of readers’ reactions, and especially those who berate or belittle them for having what the readers feel are legitimate concerns, only make things worse.
It would be nice to have a little more understanding on both sides, and attempts to engage and communicate, rather than the ridicule and anger we’ve seen so far. It seems particularly needed on the Macmillan side of things—e-book readers (at least the ones who aren’t extremists) have some valid concerns, and it’s annoying getting pigeonholed as entitlement-ridden cheapskates. (Probably almost as annoying as it is for authors to get pigeonholed as greedy, uncaring misers.)
It would also be good if someone could convince the publishers to update their pricing on Fictionwise and eReader, bring it into line and demonstrate the sort of “variable pricing” they would like to bring to Amazon.
But maybe I shouldn’t expect miracles.
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Someone has to take into consideration the shoddy quality of most ebooks sold today. Any longtime reader of ebooks has encountered mysteriously changing fonts, strange indenting, variable spacing between words or no spacing between words, random blank pages, charts and tables that aren’t readable, and lots of general typos and misspellings.
I’m willing to pay more for ebooks but first I’d like to see just one publisher or author express even the slightest interest in the quality of their ebooks sold while they’re raising their prices. To me a digital product that looks like the book’s rough draft was formatted by monkeys isn’t really worth the price of a hardcover.
OK, so writers start looking into that actual details of the dispute between Amazon and Macmillan. Coming fast on the heels of the Apple iPad/iBooks announcement, it’s the catalyst for any who aren’t already thinking in these terms to seriously evaluate the overall situation as regards the power Amazon wields and how ebooks factor into that.
The de-listing and whitewashing would be alienating in and of themselves if Amazon was only one among many such, but it’s *the* Big Fish with all the others little minnows in comparison. If Amazon chose to allow tag-based censorship of works with “adult” content on principle, rather than in a monumental fuck-up, a graphic-homosexuality tag on my work on the basis of a gay sex scene or two could result in the virtual equivalent of being taken off the shelves of every major bookstore chain. And if they’ll de-list as a way to coerce a publisher, I have *zero* faith in them not doing so under concerted lobbying.
And now this market dominance as online retailer is being translated into *the media itself*, with the proprietary format of the Kindle and their pricing strategy for ebooks clearly calculated at establishing their platform as *the* platform. On principle, I hate proprietary formats as a 20th century strategy with no place in the new media. Once you have mp3s, minidiscs are a step back. Amazon’s strategy is a step right back to VHS and Betamax, in fact: get your platform to be the only one on which all the content is available and lock the consumer into your business.
So, yeah, now you have the threat of a monopoly of the media itself with all that goes with it — c.f. Cory Doctorow’s attitude:
“Either Amazon will succeed in locking people in, at which point it will become a kind of mashup of the worst elements of the Recording Industry Association of America, Microsoft and the mafia, or they’ll fail.”
The point is that if Amazon corners the market in ebooks it’s equivalent to having only one digital publisher to choose from who sells direct to the consumer. The direct sales is good, but the lack of choice is big time BAD, not least because this would be a publisher without centuries of legal to-and-fro having established any sort of understanding.
It may sound implausible to an outsider, but the reality is that, as corporate as they are, the BPHs are staffed at the mid-level by people who genuinely care about books and the people who write them. With writer and editor, you’re *not* looking at a relationship comparable to that of musicians and the producers who see them as cash cows. The editor is often the writer’s fiercest champion against corporate interest.
But I won’t belabour this point; I hope you’ll just take on trust what I think is a fairly commonplace writer PoV: unlike music or comics, television & cinema, with their work-for-hire set-ups, ratings-driven executives and micro-managing Big Name Producers, the book publishing industry is more symbiotic than parasitic. I’ve put two books out with a big publisher, one from an indie and I’m currently involved in an experiment with direct-sales of fiction in digital form, so hopefully that gives you an idea of where I’m coming from — an open rather than closed outlook.
Again, this isn’t an attempt to persuade people over to “my side.” The point is to make another comparison. Because where a lot of ebook readers seem to have seen the Macmillan de-listing as an underdog sucker-punching a bully, some of us, I reckon, saw Macmillan’s challenge to the Kindle pricing scheme — *even before you look at the agency model itself* — as disarming a guard who was trying to herd us all onto a train bound for a bad, bad place, a city called Monopolis.
Sure, but you are also talking about making the transport routes stronger to six bad, bad places called Oligopolis A-F.
Taking this angle it is also pretty funny to see people say – no more telling people to buy from Amazon – I’ll suggest Barnes & Noble to them! As opposed to The Book Depository, etc.
Now that’s an awesome, well-reasoned article. Thanks!
Blue Tyson: Short answer: on a lot of the blogs I’ve seen by authors or fans in the SF/F community, people have been pointing to The Book Depository. That’s exactly where the links on my blog now go.
Hal,
Good. As there you have a direct competitor – and even from a different country.
Their presence actually has made a difference for us – the prices Amazon charged to actually ship books to us just kept going up on the postage end way past what it should have been. After their entry, they dropped them quite a bit.
That free shipping is pretty nice while it lasts!
ficbot,
You’re wrong. I AM listening. My pricing is already balanced with audience. Believe me, I’m as frustrated with Macmillan’s pricing as the rest of you are, and I will NOT pay the $15 they are asking. No way. No how.
It’s NY that isn’t listening…yet, as you noted, but what have you tried? Not everything at your disposal, I’d wager. It’s not impossible to get their attention, but it may take anything from organizing a letter writing/blog/etc. campaign (which even the indies would help you with) to boycotting them (which I hate to say, since that hurts the authors first and the publisher and their investors second) to making a stink in the press about why the readers won’t purchase from certain companies. Give them bad press. That’s one thing they don’t like to see, guaranteed. That’s often what it takes to make corporations change their tune.
B
Great article Chris. It’s an extremely thorough, and, I think, cool and unbiased summary of the current state of this debate.
Brenna,
The Macmillan are Big Fat Liars booklist will definitely exist if they don’t live up to it.
That one is a fairly trivial programming problem.
Brenna, it seems you want me to do all the work here
Is it really MY job to beg and plead with them and devote who knows how many man-hours just to get them to take my money? Do you not understand how broken a system that is? I have written to authors, I have written to retailers, I have written to publishers, I have blogged, and frankly I feel I have done my bit. To do ‘everything at [my] disposal’ seems to be a grand expectation for you to have for me. In what other industry does the customer have to do all the work? If I am going to put such efforts as you propose into getting a book sold, it may as well be a book *I* have written where I will at least see a material profit from the efforts…
Ficbot,
Completely agree. I was just talking about this here.
http://twitter.com/bluetyson
I can’t think of any other consumer industry where it is this hard to buy something.
It was suggested in this conversation that could automate the process of writing to publishers when there is an ebook but not sold in that region.
There’s an opensource program for you. A really simple one.
You could check the version from grovel ‘pretty please mr publisher would you be so kind as to possibly consider this’ through ‘up yours clown, I’m downloading it for free’.
The georestriction thing is much worse for Australia (or NZ) of course, and other places will be worse still, if non-English speaking.
Eventually it will get to the stage where we just won’t care anymore, and the general population will do what they will do. The retired woman in the street knows how to use limewire for music, the grandfather at the market bittorrent for movies, etc.
@Sandir: If you’ve followed my two comments above, this is the point where that author PoV runs up against the ebook reader PoV. I’m kind of glad this blow-up has happened in some respects, because without the sort of links in this piece I wouldn’t have known just *how* staggeringly low quality we’re talking here (the LotR, Harry Dresden, etc. stuff described by Melina123, for example). All I can do at the moment if give an author PoV on potential reasons for a) the shoddiness and *more importantly* b) the obliviousness, and hope it helps in getting a better sense all round of how the fuck this shit needs to get sorted.
So: One key problem in this kerfuffle has been that, speaking personally at least, my first point of contact with that ebook reader PoV was *not* the very reasonable concerns that have clearly been a part of the core discourse among the ebook community for a while: shoddy quality; geographic restriction; lending restrictions; over-pricing. It was with a howl of outrage where all of that was shoved to the back in favour of an attack on the agency model in favour of Amazon’s existing scheme — in which ebooks are sold at a loss to leverage Kindle sales.
I heard an echo of that outrage a while back when the campaign of 1-star reviewing geo-restricted ebooks caught my attention (when it happened to a couple of colleagues). This was, I can tell you for a fact, profoundly counter-productive. It’s the equivalent of slapping a writer in their face because they haven’t managed to sell a translation of their work into your native language. It might serve to inform the writer that there’s one or two, or however many, potential readers for the work in that language if they can persuade a publisher to invest in the translation, but it tells them *louder still* that those readers are hostile; and it’s better to have your work *not* read by a hostile reader than to have one person buy it, hate it because they’re predisposed to, and then propagate that dislike, discouraging other potential readers.
Sorry, Ficbot, Blue Tyson, I can imagine how frustrating it is. But trust me on this; this “last resort” achieves the *exact opposite* of its intent. I understand where it’s coming from but only *despite* the action, not because of it. I’ll state openly and categorically that hearing about this tactic before the Amazon/Macmillan kerfuffle actively *created* a bad impression of ebook readers by presenting them as exactly the type of reader you *don’t* want — ignorant and ill-willed. It deeply undermined any impulse to subject myself to their vitriol, and pushed me more towards a dismissal of the core issue than an engagement with it. So it *sabotaged* its own goals. As for the actual problem itself and how to actually *deal* with it… I’m well up for talking about it, but I’ll pick it up in another comment. The key point here is how this primed me — I can’t speak for other writers on this — to see the “other side” in this as rampant eedjits. And then the slap on the face was followed up by… well, pissing on the value of writing itself.
From an author’s PoV — or at least this author’s PoV — that conflict of positions (the agency model versus fixed price) immediately parses to a conflict of positions in terms of how you value a work: by quality or quantity. As I’ve said on another thread here, for me the agency model reflects a valuation structure based on actual quality of service, with people paying more to get something fresh, paying less to get old news. The fixed price, in contrast, reflects a valuation structure based on… units of extruded product. Leaving aside the fact that it’s selling at a loss (message to author: “we were forced to pay X for your work but we say it’s worth less”,) and that this is being done to leverage sales of another product entirely (message to author: “we don’t care about your fiction other than as a means to sell our gadget,”) this pushes a “mercenary capitalist bastard” button with the writer like the one pushed by Macmillan with ebook readers… only our response might be even more seething. Cause where you see Macmillan treating you as marks to be fleeced, we see Amazon treating us as hacks to be *used* to fleece marks.
Part of the anger at Macmillan seems to be a signal of people *getting* this, right? Cause those year-old ebooks *should* have been lowered in price as time went on; you should be able to hang on for a better deal and not be *left hanging* cause Macmillan don’t give a fuck about your custom[**]. Part of the anger at Amazon, from a writer’s PoV, is precisely about the corporate contempt for writers, readers and the work that binds them, the way it views the whole kaboodle as simply a racket to make a dime off. A ton of shit or a ton of gold, it’s all the same $9.99 a ton to them.
Now when you get readers who really seem to be buying into that lock, stock and barrel, who express their desire for it as a demanding harague, and who’ve already cast themselves in that light with a similarly demanding harangue strategy in respect of geographic restrictions, with those 1-star reviews and all, you’ve got a perfect storm. What the writer sees is… like that customer in the restaurant who goes ballistic at the waiter. You don’t know what’s upset them because they’ve gone on a wild rant about *everything* that’s wrong with the restaurant, so fundamentally incensed about the consistently shoddy service throughout all the years they’ve been coming that you can’t understand why they *ever* come here. You might try and figure out their beef, but they’re taking their anger out so viciously on the waiter that you’re too busy thinking they’re an arse. As they insult the service, the manager and most of all the *waiter* — who you know to be a 100% good guy who throws himself into the work and doesn’t deserve this abuse — you get angry yourself. Because you’re the chef and that waitor is part of your team.
This is where the creative temperament of some writers kicks in. You got your arrogant toss-pots and bugfuck neurotics, don’t get me wrong, the egoists who would ride rough-shod over that waiter themselves, but the bolshie motherfuckers who cannot fucking stand to see someone being picked on when they don’t deserve it… they’ll bring all guns to bear. They’re the chef that will come out of the kitchen, slam a cleaver into the table, and throw that customer out on their ear. And if a big part of the customer’s fury is that steak tartare should *always* cost less than a Macdonalds, because it costs *nothing* to cook… well, that’s when the “fuck you, ya fuckin fuck!” response kicks in. It’s not the “cheapskate” part of “entitlement-ridden cheapskates” that pushes that button. It’s that while fiction *is* a service rather than a product, the “I pay you, so you serve me” becomes a strident “I pay you, so you are my bitch” — a demand for a type of service far beyond the implicit contract — at the exact same time as the *core* service (quality & novelty in writing or cooking) is implicitly dismissed as *not what’s being paid for.* Saying something is bad and unoriginal is often less offensive than when you basically say, “I don’t give a fuck if it’s good or bad, original or unoriginal; but when I order my shit sandwich or my steak tartare on paper plates, you chiselling fuck, anything over $10 is a fucking outrage considering all the money you save on washing crockery!”
Lesson One in How Not To Communicate A Problem To An Artist is pretty much “Don’t insult the craft itself.”
A footnote I forgot on the last comment:
[**] I hear you on Macmillan’s past history with Fictionwise, but this is about the paradigm, not the practice, specifically how it affected the author PoV. Things to bear in mind: the confusion over how Fictionwise and Macmillan do business. The Fictionwise deal with Macmillan was *not* on an agency model; as I understand, that whole model was Apple’s innovation, didn’t exist to be implemented. The idea that it *was* seems to be a misunderstanding of the traditional wholesale model implicit in Fictionwise’s Publisher Info. (It’s there in black and white on their web site.) The way this works? Macmillan sets the list price that a book “should” sell for *theoretically*, but Fictionwise has ultimate control of its *actual* retail price. *However* even if this is so, Fictionwise presumably wasn’t going to slash its prices and sell at a loss when the sliding scale you’d expect at Macmillan’s end — the list price dropping over time as with dead tree books — *wasn’t* being implemented for ebooks. So does it really make a difference? It might indicate that Macmillan were more moronic than mercenary, chucking out ebooks here and there as an afterthought without any real attempt to create a working system, basically abandoning them to the winds. It might indicate that with the agency model now in place they can’t shirk their responsibility for the price now, which gives you way more leverage if they don’t deliver. You might consider that to be cutting them way more slack than they deserve though.
I appreciate your thoughtful response, Hal. I think part of my problem in the past has been that people like Scalzi or whomever give your side just as bad an impression as to US us our haranguers (the $5 or I go to the darknet crowd, of which I am not a part) seem to have given you. How am I supposed to feel, as a reader, when I email an author to say ‘I would like to read your book but it is not for sale to me’ only to have them say ‘yeah, not really my problem’ or worse ignore me completely? How am I supposed to feel when I email the retailer with the same question, and when they respond that it is not their problem either, I ask them to tell me who I can contact to address this and they ignore my message? How am I supposed to feel when this new MacMillan announcement asks me to accept on faith that they will value my business in the future when they don’t seem to be valuing it now? Or when a publishing house editor identifies something like piracy as the reason people aren’t buying books when, for a large segment of the customer base, the problem is simply that they won’t make the book available?
I have blogged about this—here and elsewhere—and the rare time someone ‘in the industry’ has participated in the dialogue, all I have gotten is explanations for why it is the way it is. Never has ANYBODY offered a timeline for how it might be fixed, or contact information for who we might write to in order to speed things along. It really does start to feel like one is just beating one’s head against the wall going ‘why don’t you want me?’ It truly boggles the mind.
So now, authors ARE responding. Yay. Too bad many of them seem to be responding by berating readers like they are the enemy just because they want a sensible commerce system where they can actually BUY the books! I think most devoted readers will agree that is is fair to expect them to pay for it, but we do get angry when we are asked to pay hardback prices for books we can find in paper for $5 or when we are asked to spend hardback prices on a book crippled by DRMM etc etc etc
I just think it is time for all of us to work together on this because it feels like ALL of us have tried to work on it from our own ‘camps’ and nobody is getting anywhere…
Ficbot: A quick question before I try and address the geographic restriction from an author perspective: from my reading on this, the geographic restriction seems to have kicked in rather than been there from the offset; is that right? Or was it there from the get-go, but with more systems coming into place more recently? A lot of the discontent I’ve come across in trawling the interwebs seems to date from just last year.
Hal,
Some of that is wrong, though. Because the books in question are in English. Both our native languages, presumably.
It isn’t that those readers are hostile to the author. They are hostile to the publisher. They WANT to get the book. So if they think they will like it, quite a bunch of them will like it, and write that they do. People generally aren’t buying ebooks as gifts, buying something they don’t like to give to someone else. The business practices of those you sign contracts with will affect you, that is unavoidable. So in actuality the author is losing sales and further, losing readers, maybe for good. The case of a high-profile pop politics book is going to be a little different to the latest SF novel, certainly, and the percentage of people that are less keen getting that will be higher. Generally speaking you’ll see ‘it sucks I can’t buy this, publisher’ as opposed to ‘this author is a greedy pig and the book is terrible’, because it is the former that is the point.
What percentage of the garden variety author has a separate Australian deal, for example – or garden variety SF/Fantasy author?
Even it appears when they may have sold Aus/NZ rights, too – and the writer is popular enough to have a US edition and a UK (Aus/NZ bundled here some of the time) edition – they still won’t sell here. The ONLY place that still sells a few to us of the new books is Amazon, it appears.
Or, it seems to the average person that the combination of author, agent (if they know they exist) and publisher are just basically incompetent as far as this goes.
Speaking of mercenary capitalist bastards, though, I don’t have any problem with a consistent variable price. My opinion is trying to sell ebooks at $27.00 is stupid for fiction, though. Kobo the retailer agrees, it appears, if you look at their blog.
So if they do it and get it wrong, they will bankrupt themselves and problem may be solved that way. Losing the Murdochs et al. might be good for publishing in the long run.
However, they also don’t appear to have tried the ‘sell it early and sell it for lots’ e-Arc manoeuvre. There are zero fiction writers I’d pay $27.00 to get as an ebook. There are a tiny number at $15.00, and it grows below that, just as one person. Would I pay $27 to get one three months early? Possibly.
I’ve said before that all multibillion dollar media conglomerates are bad, which you may have guessed from the above. So are huge retailers, same thing as mentioned above.
Authors getting upset is good from the actually noticing the issue point of view – and people realised that while being ignored elsewhere this would gain attention. You can certainly blame some of this on the crappy customer service of the publishers.
Any author is free to call me a cheapskate if they like. However, the response is certainly definitely likely to be ‘fuck you you fucking ignorant fuck’ as being Australian books here cost double or triple depending, and have done all my life. I have bought thousands. I have gotten rid of thousands of others. So we have all paid lots of extra money to Northern Hemisphere media capitalist bastards for a long time.
If you are talking about the reader’s POV: Remember that less than a year ago your publishers would sell books to everyone. Take the reverse situation, I imagine authors would be pretty upset if retailers just stopped selling their books also for corporate reasons. Oh wait – did something like that just happen?
So, Lesson one for writers:
As general advice: ranting and railing in public against those who want to give you money is not a great marketing strategy. There are many, many times the people watching than those that are interested enough to talk about it. Attack one is a proxy attack on the rest.
Someone used some interesting terminology about this (forget who) – that’s how you turn evangelists into terrorists. As in, ‘I really like her books, you can get them here’. To, ‘yeah, a good writer, but a bugfuck neurotic abusive scumsucker who hates us’ so here’s where you get them for free, and I’ll help you to if you want, if you are still going to bother. Or even borrowing ‘em from the library and scanning and uploading.
If to the person you are ‘just another writer’, they’ll give you the arse completely without a second thought.
Losing the occasional 2 book a year reader for good maybe not a big deal. Losing bunches that buy in the triple figures? That will add up pretty fast.
Or as you say, book buying bolshies who don’t like seeing people picked on exist on the other side, too. Lose enough of the paying variety, and you are toast. There are many, many more of these people than there are authors, obviously.
(If you are Stephen King you can run around painted blue screaming and playing the Cheapskate Blues on recorder with a carrot up your bum and still do fine, of course.)
Hal: On georestrictions -
It was instituted wholesale circa mid-2009, as a rule of thumb, started a bit earlier than that.
So the literal situation I had was bought one book in a series, the next came out, suddenly could not. In more than one case.
You’ll find similar sorts of discussions about Australians and tv, Australians and music, Australians and movies, etc.
Hal: As Tyson says, last year or thereabouts is when it happened. My guess is that the Kindle’s runaway popularity caused publishers to look at the sales figures and go, “Wait a minute. They’re selling these to people in countries we aren’t licensed for. We could get sued for letting that happen.” Boom: geographic restrictions.
As I posted over on Tobias’s blog, the root cause is the whole “point of sale” double-standard. This is of course very frustrating for Ficbot and Tyson, who don’t have as many (or any?) e-book stores in their native countries as we do, but those countries at least have English as a native language. To prove the utter absurdity of this I’m going to use an extreme example.
If some English-speaking expatriate in Afghanistan or Vietnam or some other country where English is a minority wants to order a paper book from Amazon.com, they’ll be happy to ship it to him, no problem. The “point of sale” is Amazon’s warehouse, and so they’ve sold that book “in the USA” even though they’re shipping it overseas.
But if he wants to order an e-book, he’s usually out of luck, because the “point of sale” is considered to be his computer in that foreign country. Thus, by selling to him, Amazon or whoever would be selling that book in that foreign country, and the publisher of that edition doesn’t have sale rights for that country.
It’s all very well to say that these people should order from e-book companies within their own country—but you’ve already seen Ficbot’s and Tyson’s problems with that coming from countries where English is the native tongue. There’s no way any publisher in a non-English-speaking country is even going to be interested in licensing English language books, let alone find a local e-book vendor to carry them. I’d say it’s a “catch 22,” but the expatriate probably can’t buy that e-book either.
This is a pure relic of the print publishing days, when no publisher had the size or facilities to serve the entire world so you had to license nation by nation in order to be able to fully exploit your work. But it’s really getting in the way of adoption of e-books, and there’s no reason except inertia that national licensing should should apply to a product that can be delivered in a heartbeat anywhere the Intertubes go.
Damned if I know how to fix it, though.
There’s actually one that just started here, readwithoutpaper.com
Some reasonable prices, does have some mainstream books.
Also has a bunch of audiobooks that seemed to be good prices.
Selection is small so far, but think they are adding. Also some books only Adobe PDF, which is rather yuck.
Last time I looked, no Alastair Reynolds, but they do now! Also some epub.
Might be a good article for you, Chris, talking to them and some of the issues.
Interesting.
I got Zima Blue by Alastair Reynolds for $11.99 at Amazon late last year.
Now says ‘Digital List Price’ $26.40 and Amazon selling for $16.40 a couple of months later.
readwithoutpaper has it for 23.40 in real money.
So is that new Hachette pricing, Amazon’s doing, a mistake earlier, or what?
Good summary Chris.
One method of ‘fixing’ geo-restrictions is to sell worldwide rights (print and e) to a single publisher (e.g. Julie E. Czerneda), but that would require ‘lost’ non-US(/UK etc) ebook sales royalties to be more important to authors than the lower international rights sales.
PS this is the first place I’ve seen a ‘subscribe to email without commenting’ option, I approve!
Because the books in question are in English. Both our native languages, presumably.
Bollocks it is. My native language is Scots.
But seriously, the point isn’t about language but about rights. With translation the normal problem is rights not being sold. If a Russian reader slaps me in the face for my book not being available in Russian, they’re not a reader I want; we’re not simpatico. If Russian fandom starts a campaign to do it, that’s a whole readership I don’t want. Sure, I want to make sales and eat, but I want to leave them satisfied with what I’ve given them; and if that’s just not gonna happen… sod it. If I don’t think you’ll care for the puppy, I don’t want to sell you the puppy.
But that’s the *normal* problem with translations — a publisher not buying the rights. The same holds true with the rights not being exercised. The reality is that Russian rights to my first novel were bought way back, but the translation never materialised. I can’t make them use those rights, any more than I could push a studio into greenlighting a movie adaptation they’d optioned. That’s where it becomes directly comparable to ebooks, because largely it’s a matter of publishers not exercising rights.
What can be done to make them, why they’ve been so lousy at it and how geographic restriction factors in, how far authors want to be taking over… I’ll throw some more thoughts in presently in a separate comment rather than get bogged down in it here. I’m not trying to address how it should be and how to get there yet. I’m trying to address how it is.
Part of that I’ll reiterate because it’s about as factual as can be. The 1-star review *is* hostile to the author. It may be a hostile act with strategic aims but a strategic vote is still a vote. A strategic slap in the face is still a strategic slap in the face. Denying this is kind of like saying, “No, my action does not make you sad; it makes your publishers sad,” when I’ve just told you it makes me sad. Similarly…
Authors getting upset is good from the actually noticing the issue point of view – and people realised that while being ignored elsewhere this would gain attention.
Again, this is *actual feedback* for your campaign. I’m not theorising effects; I’m reporting them. The response that campaign engendered was dismissal, for me and for others. I’ll guarantee that for many authors now that term “geographic restriction” acts as a warning signal that they’re dealing with an unreasonable crank. It will go in a little box along with “the problem with immigration” or “political correctness run rampant” or whatever other such phrases set off, at best, someone’s “nod and smile” response. Most will just shake their heads at how some nutjobs on the internet can’t get their heads around basic realities of copyright. If you want to stick to your faith, fair enough; the reality is my “actually noticing the issue” comes from engaging with the Macmillan de-listing, looking at the gulf between the attitudes on either side of the fence, and being congenitally incapable of not wanting to take this sort of dichotomy apart and figure out the what, how and why of it.
As above. Saying, “but this makes authors pay attention,” to an author who’s just told you it made him (and others) *not* pay attention is a mistake heading in the same direction as the strategy itself.
Anyway, I’ll come back to this in a bit, as I say, to try and get into the nitty gritty of the core issues. Later.
Oh, and thanks for confirming what I thought with georestrictions.
Hal:
I expect the Gaelic translation right smartly, then.
Completely obvious they will be sad, of course. And sure, they can nod and smile.
And feedback? I’ll tell you what the average Australian’s reaction will be, from long experience which such when confronted with patronising Northern Hemisphere media types : “Fine, stupid yanks/poms who don’t want money. May as well download the stuff seeing we can get it. They’ve been ripping us off for years, anyway.” So the ‘cranks’ come in numbers that have quite a few zeros after them.
People with that opinion who complain about how tough it is to be an author will also just provoke chortling in response. (Or good, you deserve it! from some).
That’s the other basic reality of copyright. Copying gets easier every year. So if the above feel like painting bullseyes on themselves, good luck.
The Australian Federal government will also be quite pleased at this saving the taxpayers lots of money without them having to lift a finger, given the recent publishing lobby efforts to retain high prices.
Take a longer term view, and handwaving numbers. Let’s believe John Sargent of Macmilland and the book market can’t really actually grow. If ebook purchasing becomes 25% or 50% of the market? Then all the outside the country sales that would have been made are gone if this is still broken? Who fancies a 10% permanent sales loss, or 15% etc? Them’s company killing numbers, Tex? That’ll be fun having all those books tied up in bankruptcy deals and unbuyable by anyone. Borders would definitely be dead and Amazon and Barnes & Noble will have plenty of fun sticking the knife (and some hobnailed boots) in. Note, speaking of Scots I believe this last part is also One Mr. C. Stross’ opinion, too. Also an author, and smarter than either you or I as far as this sort of thing goes most likely.
If the head nodder attitude helps oligopoly death along, fine by me. In fact, the rest of the world will be thanking them. Of course, it also might help oligopoly to duopoly or monopoly, too. Be lots of handwringing and bawling then, speaking of sad.
More money to Night Shade, Baen, or places like Book View Cafe sounds good to me, and also a possible renaissance of smaller outfits, or authors selling direct. Dunno if any of the latter are stupid enough not to sell to everybody, but I’d hope not.
Also of course possible that the market grows thanks to ease of access and in-country ebook purchasing makes up that difference and more. This happens and no change in business practices, the Australian government will still be happy for the same reasons.
Place your bets.
Nice spare bankroll building up thanks to non-purchasing of books, too!