The Authors Guild and its allies have recently appealed to the Department of Justice to investigate Amazon’s possible monopoly control of the book business. It is hard to quarrel with the fact that Amazon delivers more of the publishing output to consumers than any single account ever has and that they are, inevitably, changing the economics of the business as a result.
Although those fighting Amazon can and will point to what they consider to be situations where Amazon takes unfair advantage of its marketplace position, there are two aspects of what has transpired over the past 20 years that the critics who plead for government intervention will almost certainly ignore.
Most of Amazon’s success is due to their own stellar performance: innovating, investing, executing, and having a vision of what could happen as they grew.
Most of what Amazon has done to build their business — almost all of what they’ve done until the past few years of Kindle dominance — benefited most publishers and helped them grow their sales and their profitability. (In fact, book publishing uniquely among media businesses didn’t fall off a cliff in the decade surrounding the millenium and a strong case could be made that Amazon actually saved them.)
This has not stopped. The most recent example was announced yesterday. Amazon is now enabling readers to sign up on their favorite authors’ pages for notification of forthcoming books. This once again demonstrates Amazon’s willingness to innovate. And by doing this they also will deliver benefits to the publishers — an increase in out-of-the-box sales of new books to the authors’ sign-up lists. But the chances are that authors will be more appreciative than publishers will. That aspect of this initiative then feeds into the meme that “Amazon is taking over!”
In our digital marketing business, we often point out to publishers and authors that creating a robust and complete author page at Amazon should be a key element of any author’s digital footprint. It gets seen by a lot of people and it gets crawled by Google, enhancing Google’s understanding of who an author is and increasing the likelihood that they’ll be found through search, even searches that don’t include their name or their book titles. Looking at things from the publishers’ perspective as we tend to do on this blog, we’ve made the point that publishers need to encourage — or create — competent and well-SEOd author websites or risk having the Amazon author page. or even the book’s Amazon title page, become the highest-ranking return for a search for that author’s name.
When we talk about author websites, we stress the importance of building the fan base in size and intensity. Among the big literary agencies investing in helping authors with their digital presence (and many are), we helped one figure out the techniques to teach to help their authors gather mailing list names (or what Seth Godin called “permissions” for the first time about two decades ago when he was among the first to see the value in building email lists).
Now Amazon has, in their typical way (simple and self-serving) made this incredibly easy. We’ve met publishers who wonder why an author would need a website of their own rather than just a page on the publisher’s site. There are a lot of reasons that might be true, including many publishers’ apparent reluctance to “promote” the books an author has done with a prior publisher. But now publishers might hear authors asking the question a different way. Why do they need any author page on the Web besides the one they get from Amazon?
This topic is not new. Goodreads, which was bought by Amazon, has enabled fans to sign up with authors for years, a feature that was recently updated. So have some publishers, but too seldom in an effective way. They often put their author pages in silos — like a “catalogue” — that won’t get much traffic and less engagement. The author pages are incomplete. They don’t promote interactivity.
So there is still an answer to the author’s question: what else might they need? What Amazon has created doesn’t deliver true direct connection between authors and fans. In effect, the fans are signing up with Amazon — through the author’s branded page — for notifications that will come from Amazon. There is scant indication that there will be any further sharing of that author mailing list, or any other opportunities created for the author and the fan base to communicate (although “invited authors” may be able to create a personalized message to go with the announcement). But the single most important thing an author would want to tell his/her fans is “I’ve got a new book coming” and Amazon has handled that.
And in so doing, they have increased the control they have of the book marketplace and highlighted once again that part of the ground they take is ground the publishers simply cede to them. Any publisher that is not helping authors engage with their readers and actively create their own email lists to alert the interested to new books is put on notice now that they are quite late. But one thing is still true: better late than never.
Helping authors with their digital footprint needs to move up every publisher’s priority list.
An unrelated topic but another one in the news that is important is that the German ebook market seems to be going DRM-free. The latest announcement is that Holtzbrinck will take DRM off their ebooks in Germany. The last big holdout in that market is Random House, but one wonders for how much longer. Since two of the Big Five — Macmillan and Random House — are German-owned, it is fair to ask how long it will be before the experience there is reflected in what happens here. We’ll be watching closely to see whether there is any noticeable impact on sales as a result of DRM’s removal. Although Amazon permits DRM-free distribution to those who want it, we probably won’t see them pushing this option. There’s a case to be made that one of the principal effects of DRM today is that it protects Amazon’s ability to monopolize sales to the Kindle ecosystem they created.