Tag: books

People have been asking me for my take on Amazon’s new digital subscription service, Kindle Unlimited:

After months of speculation, Amazon on Friday introduced a digital subscription service that allows subscribers unlimited access to a library of e-books and audiobooks for $10 a month.

The service, Kindle Unlimited, offers a Netflix-style, all-you-can-read approach to more than 600,000 e-books, including blockbuster series like “The Hunger Games” and “Diary of a Wimpy Kid,” nonfiction titles like “Flash Boys” by Michael Lewis, as well as literary fiction and classics.

So far, however, none of the five biggest publishers appear to be making their books available through the service. HarperCollins, Hachette and Simon & Schuster, for example, are not participating, representatives from the three companies confirmed. Penguin Random House and Macmillan declined to comment, but a search on Amazon suggests that they are not making their books available….

In offering the service, Amazon is entering an increasingly crowded marketplace. It will be competing with publishing start-ups offering similar services, like Scribd and Oyster, which charge a comparable subscription fee and have comparable digital libraries.

My initial impression is that this is excellent for serious readers. At $120 per year, and an average price per ebook of around $7, one only has to read 17 books per year to make it worth one’s while. Books are considerably more fungible than the average writer or publisher would like to admit, but at the end of the day, it is the act of reading that the reader enjoys more than the average title he reads. And the sort of people who will benefit most from the subscription model are the sort of readers who will make do with reading the back of a cereal box if nothing else is available.

Casual readers, book collectors, and fans of particular authors aren’t likely to be too fussed about it. The casual readers don’t read enough to spend the money subscribing, collectors don’t want to borrow books (the subscription model is more akin to paying for the loan of a library book than purchasing a book), and fans of particular authors are going to buy the author’s book whether it is available through Kindle Unlimited or not.

How will it effect writers and publishers? It depends. It is horrific for the Big Five publishers and their writers, as their unwillingness to participate indicates. The Big Five’s model depends upon the fungibility of authors within their ecosystem, and is increasingly dysfunctional as yet another channel outside their quasi-monopoly over the bookstores drains more book buyers from that ecosystem. As with the coming in-game retail channel I’ve spoken about for the past year, Kindle Unlimited is just one more way to free additional readers from the traditional publishing channel. Marketing and branding, two things that the Big Five have shown themselves to be remarkably incompetent at, are of increasing importance as the ability to buy shelf space becomes unimportant.

It’s neutral to modestly positive for independent publishers, their writers, and self-publishers. Neutral because they’re essentially already operating in the system via Kindle Select; this month Castalia’s books that are participating in the Select program vary from 5 percent to 30 percent loans as a percentage of their sales. Modestly positive because that drainage from the Big Five ecosystem will be flowing disproportionately to the indies and the selfies to whom that new channel is flowing. The challenge facing them remains exactly the same as before, namely, how to get people to notice they exist. It’s not going to get any easier for them, but unlike the Big Five, it’s not getting any harder either.

The reason the big authorial names are screeching is because they know that their predominance is, at least in part, the result of their favored position in the ecosystem. And, unlike the first step in the digital revolution which was within the traditional ecosystem, this second one will tend to lock them out to the extent they are contractually trapped by their publishers.

I expect the Big Five to eventually offer a competing subscription service, as that would be much easier than a joint bookstore. I also expect it to be clunky, poorly designed, and destined for a more complete failure than Nook. If they’re smart, they’ll simply buy Oyster and rebrand it. But I think events have proven that they are not particularly smart.

First, a review of Larry Correia’s Hugo-nominated WARBOUND from an honest critic:

Larry Correia can spin one hell of a yarn! He writes a cool
alternate-history world with fantastic settings, from a superhero prison
to a walled-off Berlin filled with zombies. His pacing is good and his
action scenes are riveting. I kept turning pages when I knew I really
should be doing something else, which a mark of a good book. He does
dead-pan humor extremely well, I laughed out loud several times. It’s
exactly over-the-top enough to be a great ride, and very entertaining.
When he sticks to doing what he does well he writes great fiction!

The book does have two major failings.

First, it falls into the Superman trap that many superhero stories
stumble into. The primary actor in any scene has exactly the right
amount of power to just barely overcome their obstacles. It doesn’t
matter what the power-level of the threat is. If it’s a stab to the
chest, they’ll barely survive. If it’s an army of goons they’ll suddenly
be impervious to bullets and wade through them to get to the boss, and
then barely survive the city-block-exploding powers of the boss. And
they always have just the powers they need to make it through, which
leads to things like Superman’s Brick-Laying Vision and that starts to take the tension out of things when you catch on.

I can’t disagree with that in the slightest from a plausibility perspective, although the fact that so many very successful books repeatedly utilize the “it was the nearest-run thing you ever saw” (cough, Jim Butcher, cough) tends to indicate that plausibility is wildly overrated in this regard. I try very hard to keep my action and military sequences entirely coherent and plausible, (a certain tunnel-digging sequence notwithstanding) and my books are considerably less successful in terms of unit sales than those of Messrs. Correia and Butcher. That may not be the only reason, of course, but it does tend to indicate that most readers not only don’t mind, but actually prefer what the critic describes as “the Superman trap”.

However, I think the critic goes a little off the rails in his response to Larry’s reaction to his initial review:

There were people who didn’t
feel the need to impose their will on the women they cared for back
then, even if they weren’t as common as they are now. I would prefer for
my heroes to be of that type, similar to how I would prefer for the
heroes I read in colonial-era fiction to not be slave owners and view it
as distasteful.

Larry (I gather) views this sort of attitude as something that can be
admired. He’s not a bad person or anything, but I disagree with him on
that. He views it as protecting the ones you love. I don’t consider
menacing the people my daughter loves to be protecting. (full disclosure
– I don’t actually have a daughter) And likewise, I don’t consider it
protecting someone to take away their choices (which is what was done to
Hammer when she was excluded without being given the choice to help
save mankind). I can see both of these things as character flaws that
make up a multi-faceted character. Especially in Sullivan’s case, given
his recent loss of Delila. But in that case those actions would be
portrayed as flawed actions, whereas in Warbound they seemed to be
presented as positive things.

This is the same reason I found the joy in violence distasteful. I
love violence in my fiction.  🙂 I enjoyed the violence in Warbound.
Morgan’s Altered Carbon is one of my favorite books, in part because Kovacs is such a stone-cold badass throughout. Abercrombie’s Best Served Cold is
brutal and bloody and I actually bought a physical copy, it was that
awesome. However my heroes never enjoy the violence they inflict. They
are good at it, and they use it as a tool to get what they want, but
there is never joy in it. Desperation maybe, or rage, or even just cold
calculation. I don’t know if that makes me a hypocrite. Maybe that joy
really is somewhere deep inside, the vicious pride of triumphing over
one’s enemies, of seeing them driven before you, etc. Maybe it’s only lip-service we pay to civility by pretending it doesn’t excite us on a primal level. But dammit, these are heroes. They are the idealized man, that we want to model ourselves after, and our ideals really shouldn’t act like they enjoy violence, even if they secretly do.

I find this response somewhat hypocritical. To laud Abercrombie and condemn Correia for joy taken in violence is like criticizing George W. Bush for his budget deficits and then giving Obama a pass. Abercrombie’s anti-heroes are twisted and sick individuals; some are downright sadists. Correia’s heroes, on the other hand, are normal human beings with superhuman abilities who enjoy their enhanced capabilities. To find one “awesome” and the other “distasteful” is incoherent at best.

I also find the take on enjoying violence to be even more ignorant than the critic confessed he happened to be concerning FDR’s historical behavior. The only people who don’t find joy in violence are those who have never committed it or those who have suffered too much from it. The adrenaline rush that one feels when one feels a bone crack beneath one’s fist, sees a head snapping back, or stands over a physically defeated opponent is second only to a sexual rush for most men. It is one of the greatest pleasures in life; there is a reason that so many killers find the temptation to kill almost irresistible despite the risks and penalties involved and why brawlers seek out stupid and risky fights with strangers in bars. The pleasure that is to be found in violence is the very reason that civilization is dependent upon its members learning to restrain man’s natural instinct to pursue that short-term pleasure.

The idealized man who doesn’t enjoy violence isn’t a man at all, he is a robot devoid of natural humanity. The idealized man is more akin to Larry’s heroes, who may take pleasure in violence, but are careful to ensure that the violence they commit is discriminate, justified, and in performed solely the interests of those they are sworn to defend. That justified violence most definitely includes menacing the potential threats to one’s family and loved ones. Indeed, that is one of the primary responsibilities of every father.

That being said, the critic has to be lauded for giving WARBOUND a fair shake and expressing his opinion honestly. One can disagree with an aspect or two of a review without thinking less of the reviewer. I hope more reviewers of the various Hugo-nominated works will follow his example.

Hugh Howey makes many of the same points I have concerning the Amazon-Hatchette battle, only in more detail, and he reminds everyone that the behavior of the Big 5 publishing cartel from which Amazon has liberated authors is worse than most people know:

The real monopoly, once you start examining business practices and attitudes, is Big Publishing itself, a group so entrenched with one another and indistinguishable from one another that they simply go by the collective moniker: The Big 5.

Their contracts are functionally identical. Their e-book royalties (and most others terms and clauses) are lockstep and are not negotiable. They have a history of working together in a noncompetitive fashion in order to raise prices for their customers (prices that they would love to set at twice what mass market paperbacks formerly cost). Conferring by phone or email in this culture is considered polite, not illegal. It wasn’t long ago that top editors at the major houses would meet on Wednesdays to discuss the bestseller list, to congratulate one another on acquisitions, and to discuss business plans and practices. All completely normal. Celebrated, even.

When members of the Big 5 do compete (truly compete, not just offer varying marketing promises and sizes of advances), the offender needs to be reigned in quickly. When Simon & Schuster innovated with print-only deals—thereby landing bestselling authors who were otherwise never going to sign with any major publisher—the resulting press on these deals (and likely pressure from other publishers) caused an immediate retreat. The poor publisher who stepped out of line dutifully pulled back into rank. Print-only deals were no longer on the table. Contracts snapped back to their immutable and noncompetitive form.

Or what about the “most favored nation clauses?” These pernicious contractual entities stipulate that any authors who get higher royalties in the future will trigger a retroactive match in royalties for select existing authors. This is like a sports contract that simply stipulates “I’ll always be the highest paid player.” It hamstrings all the publishers in a knot of anti-competitiveness. Where is the outrage or the reporting? Once again, we have a hardening of the monoculture where dissent is impossible and innovation stifled. Instead, the major publishers play Monopoly like my boss used to.

Unable to tolerate a move toward democratic literature, where any voice is free to publish, where authors are paid 70% of list price instead of a mere 17.5%, they rely instead on appeals to litigation, on a public relations campaign within the press, and on collusion.

Another point that I have not seen anyone touch upon is that unlike the Big 5, Amazon gives authors direct access to international book-buying markets. Tomorrow, Castalia House will be releasing its second and third Brazilian Portuguese books, Um Homem Desintegrado and Gravidade Mortal. That simply would not have been possible if Steve and I were publishing through a traditional publisher.

However, this is the core point: “Why show support for a corporation that may lower royalties to 30% in the future when you can celebrate a corporation that pays 17.5% today? Why show support for a corporation that may raise prices in the future when you can champion a corporation that colludes to raise them today? The groupthink and absence of reason is baffling.”

There are two reasons. The first is that authors are conditioned to kowtow to the traditional gatekeepers. The second is that authors who are doing well under the current system are terrified that they may not be able to compete as effectively without being the structurally favored sons – and daughters – of the gatekeepers. And given what the gatekeepers have been favoring for the last two decades, I suspect their fears are well-justified.

One final note: it is ABSOLUTELY INSANE that the conventional publishers aren’t leveraging their one area of historical expertise by doing print-only deals. It’s the one thing they can do very well that the independents and self-publishers can’t as easily do, and in many cases, that the two groups won’t even bother doing. Instead, by insisting on being granted both print and ebook rights, they’ll usually end up with nothing.

Speaking of Amazon, the Hugo-nominated novelette “Opera Vita Aeterna” is a free download from Amazon today and tomorrow. Not only do the Big 5 publishers give away only a small fraction of the free books that Amazon does, but they junk their unsold stock rather than let anyone read them.

UPDATE: The Amazonians are voting with their downloads.

Lady Astronaut of Mars: #1,942 Free in Kindle Store
Opera Vita Aeterna:
#628 Free in Kindle Store

(Relax, I know the rankings are dynamic. This is more of that strange and unfamiliar concept called ‘humor’.)

I think this marks the point at which George Martin has officially lost the plot. I never thought he was likely to finish all seven books, but now they’re talking about stretching the series to eight? I assume they’ll end up enlisting Joe Abercrombie, or one of the HBO screenwriters, to finish them after Martin goes the way of all Starks in Westeros, but I think that Martin should instead consider pulling an epic literary prank that would dwarf the HBO campaign featuring Sean Bean that misled all the viewers who hadn’t read the books.

What if everything that has “happened” is just a terrible nightmare of the Mad King, Aerys II Targaryen? How AWESOME would that be? After A DANCE WITH DRAGONS, it would probably be considerably more entertaining than whatever perversions and grotesqueries Martin, or his successor, attempts to gin up in order to prod his torpid readers into feeling some sort of emotional reaction to the events in the books.

Amazon is cracking down on the ability of major publishers to rip off authors:

The battle is being waged largely over physical books. In the United States, Amazon has been discouraging customers from buying titles from Hachette, the fourth-largest publisher by market share. Late Thursday, it escalated the dispute by making it impossible to order Hachette titles being issued this summer and fall. It is using some of the same tactics against the Bonnier Media Group in Germany.

But the real prize is control of e-books, the future of publishing.

Publishers tried to rein in Amazon once, and got slapped with a federal antitrust suit for their efforts. Amazon was not directly a party to the case but has reaped the rewards in increased market power. Now it wants to increase its share of the digital proceeds. The publishers, weighing a slide into irrelevance if not nonexistence, are trying to hold the line.

Late Friday afternoon, Hachette made by far its strongest comment on the conflict: “We are determined to protect the value of
our authors’ books and our own work in editing, distributing and
marketing them,” said Sophie Cottrell, a Hachette senior vice president.
“We hope this difficult situation will not last a long time, but we are
sparing no effort and exploring all options.”

What is hilarious is the authors and publishers crying about how Amazon is “raising the prices” of their books. It’s an absolutely ridiculous charge. What Amazon is actually doing is refusing to continue its extreme discounting on the artificially high retail price of books.

Castalia House has no issue with Amazon, and Amazon doesn’t discount its prices on our ebooks much because they are already in the price range that Amazon expects: 2.99 to 4.99. But publishers that price their ebooks at $15.99 are in trouble, because no one wants to pay actual retail price for them on Amazon. Compare the price of two John C. Wright books. We sell AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND for a digital list price of $4.99. Tor sells JUDGE OF AGES for a digital list price of $26.99. Tor is counting on Amazon being willing to offer the customer a 45 percent discount, thus allowing Tor to collect $12.15 (assuming the standard 55 percent distribution discount) on an ebook compared to the $3.50 that Castalia receives. But Amazon only makes one dollar more from the 5x more expensive Tor book than it does from the Castalia book, which means a 17 percent operating margin instead of a 30 percent margin.

And Amazon sells more copies of the lower-priced books. At $4.99 AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND is #18,816 on Kindle. At $27.99 reduced to $12.99, JUDGE OF AGES is #41,075. Ebook prices are elastic, so if Amazon can sell 2 low-price ebooks for every 1 high price ebook, it not only makes a) about twice the margin, but also b) about fifty cents more.

No wonder Amazon is unwilling to continue the conventional arrangement. Amazon can only successfully sell its books up to a certain price, depending upon the format and length. Due to the distribution discount system, a higher retail price means a higher distribution price, so Amazon makes half the margin on the more expensive, more steeply discounted books from the major publishers. Amazon is not only perfectly within its rights, but logically needs to stop discounting the book from what is, after all, the publisher’s suggested retail price; Hatchette’s complaint is rooted in the fact that Amazon is now selling its books for the price that Hatchette itself suggests!

By the way, this showdown between Amazon and the major publishers is a development that I predicted would be taking place soon during my campaign for SFWA President. The possibility was pooh-poohed by the business geniuses there, including the eventual winner. Nevertheless, the outcome will likely have a huge effect on authors with major publishers because the reason the publishers are fighting this uphill battle is their inability to support their current overhead structure without the additional revenue they receive from their inflated retail prices on ebooks. If either Amazon or the author were to receive a more equitable share, no major publisher could survive in its current form.

What the publishers should do – what they should have done a long time ago – is to set up a joint online store and then stop distributing books through Amazon. But they didn’t have either the nerve or the foresight, so now they’re faced with trying to develop some sort of alternative as Amazon begins to dip its toes into its own publishing line. Their best bet, in my opinion, would be to buy the Nook Store from Barnes&Noble, embrace a truly open standard, and go into competition.

However, they won’t embrace the open standard, and in doing so, they are giving up one of their two advantages over Amazon.