Yes! Progress! I actually started in again on Trials, writing 1,364 words and going over the stuff I wrote back in (holy crap) November.
I also did some tweaking with the Web site, adding a blog archive because it really annoys me when people's blogs are hard to navigate.
Passive Guy is riling me up again: Consumers are upset and "confused" about e-book pricing! For some strange reason, those silly consumers think that buying tons of paper, running a massive printing press, and shipping enormous quantities of books all over the country costs money!
The mendacity of claiming that e-books and paper books cost about the same to make is what gets to me. These cost claims are bald-faced lies--no one with any background in the industry believes them, and the people making them think the general public is a bunch of drooling idiots who will believe anything they are told.
Just so you know: Before it became strategically important to pretend that e-books cost no less to make than paper books, the rule-of-thumb estimate was that the editorial part of making a book (writing, editing, copy editing) accounted for a whopping 10% of costs. In fact, it was such a small piece of the costs that oftentimes a company would allow all that to happen before deciding whether or not to publish the book. That was really annoying if you were in editorial, because you'd do all this work on a book, and once it was finished, they'd scrap it, but that was how the finances worked.
Now, according to a lying piece of Penguin shit, editorial accounts for 90% of costs! Amazing!
I have linked to this before (warning: if you don't like the language in this post, you won't like the imagery in that one), but now I am going to quote extensively from Dean Wesley Smith's post comparing the costs of Pulphouse Publishing, his old traditional publishing company, to those of WMG Publishing today:
Not only is this new world faster by factors of a hundred or more, but the production costs don’t even come close to what was needed in 1990 to put out a book.
For example, from 1989 to 1992 we did a series of books at Pulphouse called “Author’s Choice Monthly.” The series let each author pick five or six stories, around 30,000 words, for a collection. We did one per month, sold them both in limited hardback form and unlimited trade paper form. We used the old warehouse method, meaning we had to guess ahead how many to have printed and bound. We did our own printing, then we had to haul the printed books an hour north to either a perfect bindery or the hardback bindery. Then we had to pick them up when done and bring them back to the office to be unloaded, packed, and shipped to stores and customers.
Let me put it this way as to costs. The price of the gas (for the 60 mile one way drive north to the binderies and back in 1990) for the van we used IS MORE than what WMG Publishing pays right now to put a collection of mine or Kris’s into electronic and trade paper edition.
That’s right, just the gas (in 1990 money) for 240 miles is more than I spend now for everything needed to get a collection into print.
(So, yeah, Smith's wife knows what she's talking about when she calls this cost claim "bullshit.")
Let's put it this way: I make more money selling a $3 e-book of Trang on Amazon than I do selling a $12 paper book there.
And if you think it's oh-so-different for a large corporation, remember that they are reporting higher profits as well.
Liars.
I finished Proust's In Search of Lost Time! Whoo! I liked it--it gets more and more engaging as it goes on, which is actually kind of a problem because it's so damned long....
Also, looking at my plan for when Trust comes out (assuming it ever does--God, it's tiresome to have to wait on someone else; it makes me all the happier that I don't have to deal with an entire publishing house), there's another thing I want to look into: science-fiction conventions. There's a bunch around here, and you know, part of the challenge with science fiction is that not a hell of a lot of people read it. When a large group of people who do read it gather near me, it seems like the sort of marketing opportunity it would be stupid to miss.
Clearly, advertising in the program doesn't work. I think a potentially more-fruitful approach would be to do a flyer saying, Hey, wow, the Trang series, it's just the thing for you 60s-throwback-loving sci-fi enthusiasts! and then include a Smashwords coupon for a free copy of the first book. I could even give away the copies of the paper book I was going to give away on Goodreads. Of course, the book needs to be on Smashwords for that to work, so the three months of being exclusive on Amazon need to be scheduled in around the cons....
I was talking to another writer last night, and I was trying to explain what it is editors actually do, and how they don't edit to the standard of "good" (which doesn't really exist anyway) and instead edit to the standard of "appropriate for our audience."
I wasn't explaining myself very well, and of course it wasn't until I was far, far away when the perfect example of what editors actually do came to me: Stephanie Plum.
Or actually, Janet Evanovich. Many moons ago, Evanovich was a reasonably successful romance author. She had written twelve romance books, and she was getting good and sick of the genre. So one day, she wrote a book that had lots of action and adventure...and basically no romance.
She turned this book into her editors.
Did they say, "This is fantastic! Janet, this is your breakout book--you'll be winning awards and topping bestseller lists in no time!"
No.
Did they say, "What the hell is this? This isn't a romance! What's wrong with you--get out of here!"
Dingdingdingding! Yes! Despite the fact that she'd been writing for her first publisher for years and years, Evanovich had to take her new work to a completely different publishing house for it to see the light of day.
Why? Why? you wonder. Why didn't her original editors recognize that this was going to be a really good book?
Because that is not their job. If you are a romance editor at a romance publisher, your job is to make sure you are producing romances. That is your job. If your writer comes in with the most wonderful book you have ever read, and it's not a romance, it is not acceptable. Period.
If you self-publish, it's important that you position your book correctly as to genre, right? You need to get an appropriate cover and an appropriate book description so that people know what they're getting.
The editor has a similar mind-set, but the approach is different. Their imprint only produces certain types of books. Those are the books that are appropriate for that imprint. If a book isn't appropriate, it's no good to that editor, no matter how good it is. The editor's job isn't to make the book better; it is to make the book more appropriate.
Which is why I suggest that, whoever you tap as an editor, that person should be someone who understands and likes your genre. You do want someone who will edit to a standard appropriate for your book--you don't want someone yanking the cowboys out of your Western or anything like that. But nowadays you don't have to toe the line or your book won't come out--that bit of nonsense is of the past.
This is a post from my old blog, written in 2008. I'm posting it again because I recently saw a play in which somebody had clearly gone to great efforts to rationalize a very unsatisfying story ending in a highly intellectual way, and it didn't make the story ending any less unsatisfying, nor any less essentially lazy. Also, some months after I posted this, I read an interview with one of the Lost writers, in which he parroted the New York Times article almost word-for-word--you could practically see the thought process: "Thank God! Someone's come up with a plausible-sounding excuse!"
Here's the post:
M. Louisa Locke has a well-thought-out blog post about why she's continuing to make her book exclusive with Amazon. She's not saying it's the right decision for you, or will always be the right decisions for her--just that it's working well for her now. It's a more nuanced view of short-term and long-term thinking than Dean Wesley Smith's.
One thing she talks about is risk, and how it is unavoidable:
[A]lmost any action an author takes in the midst of the rapid changes within the publishing industry can be characterized as short-term. Putting your ebooks in the Barnes and Noble Nook store, given the effect of the Department of Justice decision on agency pricing, might turn out to be a short-term strategy if this corporation goes under. Concentrating on building relationships with bookstores to get them to carry your print on demand books (a strategy that...Smith is currently advocating) may be a very short-term strategy if those bookstores go under in the next 2-3 years.
And we've just seen how unavoidable risk is with Boyd Morrison. He's a successful self-published writer who got a contract with Simon & Schuster. And then they canceled his contract. What does that mean? Remember that fancy advance a writer is supposed to live off of as he writes his book? Morrison has to pay it back. (ETA: OK, it turns out that he may not. Hopefully he won't.)
Ouch. And a cautionary tale for those who are hoping to find a safe harbor with a large publisher. (Rusch and Passive Guy both have good analyses.)
Yeah, I didn't start on Trials. I have some travel coming up, and repair work on the house is starting, and that's all taking up more of my time and attention than I expected....
You'll notice that I plan to make Trang a freebie. If you had asked me just after I finished writing it if I wanted to make the book free, I would have said, No way--I've put too much effort into this! But other people have found it helpful to make the first book in a series free, and the responses in the Trang reviews suggests that this approach should work for me. (Which I would say is another benefit to doing a giveaway and then reading the resulting reviews: It's basically market research.)
Anyway, the point is that the purpose of discounting and promotion is not to be a big ole generous goofball who never makes a dime. The purpose is to make money. A successful promotion leaves you richer in the end.
Which I think is something people tend to forget. If you make your books very cheap or free, that needs to be done strategically, not just for the heck of it (unless your only goal is to let the world know what's really going on with President Obama).
The same thing holds true for corporations: If they're going to discount something or make it free, they're doing so with the hope of making money.
I throw that out because there's a lot of genuine angst over how Amazon will handle pricing now that agency pricing is history. I've said that I don't think there's going to be a huge drop, but the worry is that Amazon will go ahead and sell both e-books and Kindles at below cost in order to drive other e-book retailers under.
The problem with this theory is that there are essentially no barriers to entry in the e-book market. It's actually pretty easy to start an e-bookstore, and new ones seem to be cropping up all the time.
Selling things at a loss to drive competitors under is something that can be an anticompetitive, monopolistic practice. But there's an end game: After you drive your competitors under, you raise prices sharply, all the while twirling your mustache and going, "Mwa-ha-ha-ha! I'm rich!!!"
You can't ever raise prices if competitors can easily enter your market. Selling at a loss to drive competitors under works great if you're, say, making industrial turbines and someone else has to spend a gazillion dollars to build a turbine factory. It works great if you have a small army of goons to burn out any new competitors. It works a lot less well if you're a glorified five-and-dime store like Wal-Mart, and all anyone has to do to compete with you is open a shop. In fact, if you're Wal-Mart, you have to keep your prices low all the time, otherwise you're screwed. That's why Wal-Mart has such an unusual supply chain--they have to keep prices low and make money at the same time. They can never reach the spot where they raise prices sharply and twirl their mustaches, going "Mwa-ha-ha-ha!"
Amazon is in an even worse pickle. If they start selling books at a loss to drive under their competition, they can never stop. The minute they let up--oh, crap, there's another competitor! A decision to wipe out the competition by selling books at a loss is a decision to lose money on books forever.
What they've done instead is more like what Wal-Mart's done--they've radically altered their relationship with their suppliers by enabling self-publishing. That way they can sell books that are really cheap--like super cheap--and still make a profit.
When people say that these low prices are unsustainable, they mean (whether they know it or not) that they are unsustainable for traditional publishers. And that's true. They're plenty sustainable for many self-published authors, though, not to mention plenty sustainable for companies like Smashwords.
And when people say that Amazon is willing to take a loss on books in order to drive traffic to its Web site where it sells other goods, well, guess what? If it works, there's nothing to stop another company from doing the exact same thing.
Once nice thing about the whole brouhaha about agency pricing is that it is drawing people's attention to the publishing industry as a business, which means that there are some good posts out now about thinking like a businessperson.
Joe Konrath has a nice one on how agency pricing hurts writers. Unlike certain writers, Konrath is very aware that the financial interests of writers and publishers (and retailers, for that matter) are not always the same. (And how awesome would it be if someone like Konrath was president of the Authors' Guild, huh?)
April Hamilton has a good one titled "If you're not ready to invest, you're not ready to publish." I'll add that you might be able to invest time instead of money, but you're going to have to invest something. That's just the nature of the beast.
Passive Guy has a good set of comments on the Bezos letter. I would scroll down to Peter Winkler's comment about how Bezos is in it for himself, and then read the replies. For the most part, they reflect a very realistic attitude toward Amazon that could be summarized as: Of course the company is in this for itself; so are we; that's capitalism. As much as the demonizing of Amazon infuriates me (and mainly it infuriates me because it's bad journalism--a respectable newspaper should at least attempt to not publish quasi-fictional tripe on any subject), it's equally important not to fall into the trap of assuming that Amazon will always take care of you. You are business partners. That is all.
Oh, and Lindsay Buroker has one on doing a paper edition of your book. I'm going to tie it back to her earlier post on revenue-per-customer: When I read Maids of Misfortune, I bought the e-book, and then I bought the paper book, because I thought my sister would like it. If a paper book hadn't been available, that would have been one less sale for M. Louisa Locke. So, while you might want to save money at the outset by not doing a paper edition, eventually I think you have to do one, because it opens up so many avenues of revenue generation.
OMFG. You know how I thought it was hilarious that the New York Times implied that Amazon was responsible for the Department of Justice's antitrust lawsuit?
Well, the Seattle Times has done an entire story titled "Speculation Abounds that Amazon Triggered E-Book Lawsuit."
They quote the same consultant who was willing to go on record making that same implication for the New York Times. Consultants like publicity, so here's how it's going to work with him: As long as he can get a quote published in a newspaper for that opinion, he will continue to have it. And if you're a reporter who doesn't want to bother actually doing any work, you'll call him.
If you're a reporter who wants to keep in tight with your incredibly anti-Amazon bosses, you'd be sure to give this speculation the puppet-master spin. Because when someone does something illegal in an attempt to harm someone else, and their victim calls the police? That's eeeeeeevil! Almost as bad as donating to charity!
What would happen if you were a reporter who actually wanted to do a little work? Not, like, actual reporting--clearly, that's too hard--but maybe just a quick search of existing articles written by others?
Well, you might discover that story published in 2010 in the New Yorker that was all about how publishers were colluding with Apple to fix prices. You might discover Steve Jobs bragging about how he got publishers to collude to fix prices and openly discussing what their prices will be. You might realize that Amazon's dispute with Macmillan was hardly conducted in secret.
And you might, like Passive Guy did, discover this article in the Connecticut Law Review, which outlines the process behind the Connecticut attorney general's decision to investigate agency pricing. (Oh, you didn't know it wasn't just the DOJ? Sixteen states are also involved. Clearly, Amazon's eeeeeevil! reaches everywhere!)
How did they decide to target agency pricing? Did Bezos call them in the middle of the night? Has he planted chips in their brains to submit them to his will? Are we all in the Illuminati together? (Well, yeah, of course we are, but that's not important right now.)
Oh, it turns out that the head of the antitrust division reads the New Yorker--he gets some of his best leads from newspapers and magazines, because people who break the law often have an odd compulsion to brag about it. According to the CLR, the article "practically drew a treasure map for the antitrust investigators." It also quotes the head of the antitrust division as saying, “This one wasn’t something exotic like an inside source.”
Wah-wah-waaaaahhhhh.
Neither of these links are technically about writing, but both are about character and character development.
Sporkchop is doing an A to Z blogging challenge (because he likes to work much harder than I do) that is primarily focused on creating good villains, heroes, and tertiary characters. His blog is about Dungeons and Dragons, so there's a lot in there about rolling dice that you can ignore, but what he's trying to do as a dungeon master is to create an emotionally engaging fictional world with believable characters and a satisfying plot line. Hopefully that's a familiar set of goals for you.
This is a post from the Comics Curmudgeon that contrasts the way a character in Mary Worth responds to events to the way someone in real life would. (Here's the character's background, if you care.) Just like with Mark Trail dialog, I think it's really useful to study stuff that's laughably bad, figure out the thought process the writer went through to get there, and try to avoid that trap in your own writing.
I'm going to take some time here and look ahead....
So, Trust should, really and for sure this time, come back from the copy editor May 1st. The plan is to input her corrections and give out advance review copies. I've set up a couple of reviews so far, but I should solicit more.
After that, I'll finish production: Lay out the large-print edition and convert the e-books. Hopefully that will mean that I don't have to revise and revise after release as I find more errors.
And then: Release!
I'm planning on eventually reaching a pricing structure where Trang is free, and all the other books in the series cost $4.99. But I want to thank my friends and the early supporters of the series, so Trust will be $2.99 for probably about a month after release (Early Bird Special!), and then will jump up to $4.99. I'll probably do that each time I release a book.
To maximize that promotion and gradually move Trang to free, I'm also going to do a Smashwords coupon for Trang that will make it free for the duration of Trust's Early Bird Special. And then it will go back up to $2.99, but I'll move it into Amazon's KDP Select program for three months. That will make it free to members of Amazon Prime and will give me five free promotion days in exchange for having it be available only on Amazon.
After that, I'm going to make Trang available everywhere. And it will probably be free--maybe 99 cents, but at this point I'm very skeptical of 99 cents because it didn't do anything for me before. I think it gives you that bargain-bin taint without making your book irresistibly cheap, so I'm feeling more like, "Go free or go home." I also could make the Google Book version of it completely accessible, and there's a Web site called Wattpad where people put their stuff up for free chapter-by-chapter, so I can put it up there, too. And I could have it here! I've got plenty of room.
Then we get into the knotty question of spending money. That's always a tricky question because, as they say, you often do have to spend money to make money, but if you spend a lot of money, you'll never make it back. Being a proud member of that most secret of secret societies, the Illuminati, I have some money to spare, but not an infinite amount.
I definitely want to explore some advertising: GoodReads and Project Wonderful seem worthwhile for my genre. There are a lot of new retail sites cropping up, some of which better serve the international market than Amazon and B&N and some of which appeal to genre readers. The issue is that a number of them require ISBN numbers, which would be another expense, albeit not a huge one. I also don't know if they allow free books--it would be weird to have every book in the series up except for Trang. So perhaps I should do this step before I start making Trang free.
Another question is audiobooks. They are expensive to produce (especially because I would absolutely have to hire voice talent--I mumble), but as a result, fewer people do them and it's easier to be discovered. Lindsay Buroker is a great enthusiast of podiobooks,which are actually given away as free podcasts (I don't know if you can compile them and sell the resulting audiobook), and clearly they have paid off for her. Also, it fits into this whole accessibility mania I have. But it cost her a thousand bucks, yoikes....
Wednesday! Wednesday, you slave driver! Today and tomorrow I have piddly crap, Tuesday I have the kid, so Wednesday it is!
I finally got around to reading through David Gaughran's blog--it's very news oriented, so many of the posts date quickly, but he's got a very detailed post of a promotion he did that had a lot of good tips (as do his other posts on promotion). But my favorite is a guest post about how Mainak Dhar learned everything he needed to know about self-publishing in seventh grade.
And I also liked this post by April Hamilton on the unpredictability of success. I do think that there is something of a formula for success, but it's certainly not as simple as Push Button A, Get Result B.
This is the kind of thing Amazon needs to be doing a lot more of, and much more aggressively. They need to push their side of the story, otherwise crap like this is going to dominate.
I've mentioned before that it really bothers me when authors have the mentality that they can't make it without a publisher. Now, often that is a result of habit, but you also see the "I need a publisher" mentality coming from brand-new writers.
In that case, I understand it more. There's a term self-published authors (especially those who are refugees from traditional publishing) use to describe the appeal of having a publisher: Validation. Typically that's said with a sneer ("He's just seeking validation; he doesn't care if he gets ripped off."), but with new writers, validation is something that is actually needed. Until you've gained enough experience to trust your own judgment, having someone say, "Yes, this is good. You aren't a self-deluded fool. You can write," is very important.
Validation doesn't need to come from a publisher, though. I had memorable validation experiences in journalism school as well as on the job, and ironically enough, throughout the whole agent/traditional publishing merry-go-round.
The ones that meant the most to me were the ones that came from my journalism professors, not the ones that came from my professional colleagues (no matter how much I respected them). That's because editors edit things to the standards of acceptability for that particular publication, not to the abstract standard of goodness the professors were interested in. The analogy I used to use was that we were making Big Macs: When you're making Big Macs, you certainly want to meet a certain standard of professionalism (two patties, three buns, no spit), but you also need a consistent product (two patties, three buns, don't get creative) and you need it finished at a particular time (meet your deadline).
The problem is that, like most cooks, most writers don't want to make Big Macs. They don't want to be Queen of the Big Macs. They know that making a Big Mac isn't very hard, and it isn't very interesting, and it's hardly an expression of their unique individuality.
So once you get a peek behind the curtain and realize that the validation from your editor is coming in the form of, "You sure made a good Big Mac!" that validation isn't actually all that gratifying. That's why more-experienced writers feel like they don't need it--they know what that kind of validation means. A reader telling you that they loved your book and can't wait for the next one to come out means more. That kind of validation means that your crazy experiments with Thai/Italian/West African fusion cuisine actually paid off.
Another reason new writers give for wanting a publisher is that they view it as their education. Instead of paying for classes or to hire people, they give up a potentially enormous hunk of future earnings to pay for the experience of getting published. That experience is supposed to teach them the ropes.
The problem I have with that is that I've worked with writers, and guess what? They weren't privy to much. They would turn something in, and then they would vanish--I never met any of the writers I edited, and I rarely communicated with them. They were kept out of the office, and they certainly never communicated with anyone in production (which I did, a lot, and yet I still didn't know everything about getting a book out). I freelanced as a writer on and off for a decade with one company, and I never met anyone from that company. Not once. I may have gone to their office once to drop something off (in which case I may have met the receptionist), but I'm not sure.
When you're a publisher, educating writers is not your goal. Getting an acceptable product out on time is the goal. Having a bunch of writers sniffing around the office getting in the way so that they can get an education (which benefits the publisher how, exactly?) does not help you get your product out on time.
Now, all this assumes that your publisher knows what makes an acceptable Big Mac. Not all publishers do. Have a look at this post (via PV): People actually sign with publishers who make their work look terrible and don't distribute it outside their own Web site.
And while you're pondering whether to sign with a publisher, here are some more questions to think about: How is your publisher coping with the changes happening nowadays? How are they handling e-books?
And who do they work with? You may have noticed a lot of fighting going on among the various e-book retail sites: If you want to stay neutral and have your stuff available everywhere, but your publisher uses IPG as a distributor, that's just too goddamn bad for you. And let's hope the people running your publishing house successfuly navigate these very dramatic industry changes, because if they don't, you are completely screwed.
PV's version of that article has some pointers for finding decent publishers, but the fundamental problem with any publishing contract is that it sews up the rights to your book for a very long time. If you are looking at the world of publishing today and going, "Oh my God! I can't tell what's going on! I don't know what's going to happen! It's so crazy!" realize that the exact same thing is true for the publishing houses--big, small, new, old, whatever. They are all looking at the future and peeing their pants, which is why some of them have done some really stupid things and are in legal trouble now. There is no one out there who knows what's going to happen; there is no one out there who knows who the winners and the losers will be. All you have is your book--do you really want to give that up?
And if you're wondering whether something as arcane as your publisher using IPG as a distributor could hurt you, I present you Ted McClelland, who was getting half his income from Kindle sales before IPG fell out with Amazon. Utterly screwed, and utterly powerless to do anything about it.
Here's a follow-up article in the Wall Street Journal that actually has...hold your hats...reasonable and accurate background information on e-publishing. Wow.
Among the inconvenient facts that will never, ever make it into the New York Times:
For now, the settlement will force the three settling publishers to rewrite their pricing agreements with retailers, allowing retailers more flexibility to discount. Publishers could stick with the existing agency model, since they won't be able to control retailer discounting, but one executive predicted the most likely outcome is a return to the "wholesale" model, which is more lucrative for publishers than the current e-book pricing model.
And:
Near term, stronger e-book sales would be good for publishers. E-books are cheaper to produce—lacking costly printing and binding—and are more efficient to distribute, since unsold books don't need to be returned to publishers. That has boosted publishers' profits in the past year or so even as revenues have eroded from falling sales of pricier hardcover books.
Random House, for instance, reported that earnings before interest and taxes jumped 6.9%in 2011 despite a 4.3% revenue drop. Simon & Schuster's adjusted Ebitda rose 40% to $28 million in the fourth quarter from a year-earlier even as revenue fell 1%.
(Emphasis added.)
But to throw a little humor in, they quote everybody's favorite clown, Scott Turow, as saying, "Money to be made in book publishing is going to decline, and therefore the money to be made by authors is going to decline."
Because 70% of $10,000 is way less than 10% of $50,000. This lesson in arithmetic comes courtesy of the president of the Authors-Are-The-Same-As-Publishers Guild. (Motto: Math is hard! Let's go shopping!)
April Hamilton has a good blog post (via PV) about a lot of the propagandistic crap that's being spewed about.
OK, I realize that I'm turning into a media wonk here, but.....
Both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times are running stories on the Department of Justice lawsuit/settlement and its likely impact on book prices.
Here's the Wall Street Journal's take:
The popular $9.99 price for best-selling e-books may be back in a big way soon.
A settlement announced Wednesday between the Justice Department and three big book publishers will almost certainly lead to lower e-book prices on an array of best-selling titles that now cost anywhere from $12 or $13 and more.
Most important for consumers who like to read, it could mean the $9.99 price point championed by Amazon.com Inc. when it kicked off the e-reader market with its Kindle device in 2007 will once again be common.
The $9.99 price for best sellers largely disappeared after Apple Inc. struck deals with major publishers that changed pricing models for e-books, ahead of Apple's release of its iPad and its iBooks digital store. Instead of letting retailers set prices, as they have long done in the print book world, publishers began setting prices—with best sellers usually priced either at $12.99 or $14.99.
And here's the New York Times' take:
The government’s decision to pursue major publishers on antitrust charges has put the Internet retailer Amazon in a powerful position: the nation’s largest bookseller may now get to decide how much an e-book will cost, and the book world is quaking over the potential consequences.
As soon as the Department of Justice announced Wednesday that it was suing five major publishers and Apple on price-fixing charges, and simultaneously settling with three of them, Amazon announced plans to push down prices on e-books. The price of some major titles could fall to $9.99 or less from $14.99, saving voracious readers a bundle.
But publishers and booksellers argue that any victory for consumers will be short-lived, and that the ultimate effect of the antitrust suit will be to exchange a perceived monopoly for a real one. Amazon, already the dominant force in the industry, will hold all the cards.
“Amazon must be unbelievably happy today,” said Michael Norris, a book publishing analyst with Simba Information. “Had they been puppeteering this whole play, it could not have worked out better for them.”
It's just beyond parody! Amazon may drop prices...because it's eeeeeevil!!!! Evil puppetmaster Amazon! Poor little mega-billion-dollar publishing companies!
Call me naive, but I am happy that the DOJ is more worried about consumers being taken advantage of than it is about whether businesses are forced to make unpleasant adjustments--and maybe even shut down--in response to change. As for Amazon's eeeeevilness, my feeling about this is that the antitrust people over at the DOJ are now very focused on books. If Amazon starts engaging in predatory, monopolistic business practices, that will presumably get noticed. In fact, Charles Petit (via Rusch) points out that some of the business practices Amazon engages in now are not kosher according to the DOJ's filing--that's the problem when the feds get involved in your industry, everything they do cuts both ways. And of course people don't have to sit around waiting for the DOJ to take action--they can file antitrust suits themselves.
You know, when you write something that generates praise like, "though I can't put my finger quite on why, this book felt surprisingly unique within the genre," you know you are in the realm of Beyond Easy Categorization. There's nothing wrong with this (presuming one exists outside the traditional-publishing matrix), but it does mean that people looking for a neat categorization might get kind of stymied. So in addition to the "60's social sci-fi" thing, I have updated the Amazon, et al. tags to include the Futures Past and Present categorization as "anthropological sci-fi."
No idea if this is a category with traction, but LET'S EXPERIMENT! 'Tis what this is all about!