Yes, once again, the little guy gets screwed . . . .
Many of you have heard me talk now and then about "print on demand" publishing, which I do through Red and Black Publishers. In "print on demand", printers use sophisticated laser printers and bookbinding machines to print books one copy at a time, as they are ordered, meaning small publishers can now afford to make titles available without having to pay the huge upfront costs of a traditional printing press run. One of the reasons POD publishing can work for small publishers, is that it gives access to Amazon.com, the largest bookseller in the world, and at Amazon, it gives small micropublishers equal status with the publishing giants, allowing us to sell our books at the same terms and with the same visibility that Simon and Schuster gets.
Well, now Amazon has thrown a Microsoft-style power play and fucked things up for all of us POD publishers . . .
Most of the commercial print-on-demand outfits, like Lulu.com, PublishAmerica or iUniverse, do all their printing at a company called Lightning Source. And since Lightning Source also does POD directly for small publishing companies, that's where I get all my printing done too.
A few years ago, Amazon bought its own POD printing company, called Booksurge (and a smaller division called CreateSpace). Booksurge was, alas, crushed into the mud by Lightning Source, and has limped along for years, unable to compete with Lightning Source's better quality and cheaper pricing.
Well, this week, right out of the blue, Amazon decided to do something about that, in the most brutally bully-like way possible -- it announced that as of April 1, it would no longer offer any print-on-demand books that aren't done through its own POD printer. No, that was no April Fool's joke. In a move right out of Microsoft's playbook, Amazon identified a market that it wanted to dominate, bought a competing (inferior) product, then used predatory tactics and monopolistic power to destroy the competition. Publishers that refuse to move from Lightning Source to Booksurge will find the "Buy Now" button on their titles' Amazon pages removed, disallowing buyers from buying directly through Amazon, and eliminating the Free Shipping and Amazon Prime options for them. It's a HUGE disincentive for anyone to buy the book.
Unfortunately for us small publishers, Amazon has us by the balls. The vast majority of my sales (and I suspect of most other small publishers' too) are through Amazon.com . So if Amazon.com refuses to sell my titles, I am well and truly screwed. It's the proverbial "offer you can't refuse".
Not coincidentally, it will cost me more to sell books through Amazon that it does now through Lightning Source. Lightning Source lets publishers choose the discount rate for the book (the percentage of the
cover price that goes to the bookstore). All my titles are set at a 25% discount, meaning Amazon gets 25% of the price, and I get the rest (minus the printing costs). For a low-volume nano-publisher like me, getting the most bucks out of each copy sold is not a matter of greed-- it's a matter of financial survival (I consider a title that sells 15-20 copies per month to be a runaway best-seller). Amazon's POD operations, though, will accept nothing less than a 40% discount, meaning that 15% of the cover price which USED to go to me, now goes to Amazon instead. I can either (1) raise the cover price 15% to make up the loss (and thereby also lose X number of sales), or (2) eat that 15% loss and smile about it.
So basically, it's "pay Amazon more, or kiss your book market goodbye". And yes, at least one of my titles has already had its "Buy Now" button "disappeared".
Lulu and iUniverse have already given in. PublishAmerica is, at last word, refusing. No word yet on whether their titles have started disappearing from Amazon yet. In the final analysis, though, PublishAmerica will have to give in too. No POD publisher can afford not to sell through Amazon. They have us right by the short hairs, and there's
absolutely nothing any of us can do about it.
It's strongarm bullying of the very worst sort. It may even be illegal under US antitrust laws -- but that will take years to thrash out, and doesn't help us in the meantime.
So . . . .
I'll be spending the next few weeks crying "uncle", and moving my titles from Lightning Source to Amazon's "CreateSpace" POD option.
Fucking bastards.
I hate corporados.
Links to read more:
http://www.writersweekly.com/...
http://online.wsj.com/...
http://blog.wired.com/...