A new source of astute analysis of Amazon has just arrived in the form of an email newsletter
This month, journalist Tim Carmody has begun delivering a new subscription newsletter, The Amazon Chronicles. Formerly with The Verge, Wired Magazine, Adweek, Kottke.org, and other outlets, Carmody writes about his new project that he’d loved covering the company and its evolution earlier in his career and wanted to get back to it. He quotes a Paul Ford article from 2013 in which Amazon was referred to as “an elephant by design, and we’re all blind men. It may not even be an elephant; it could be five.”
What both Ford and Carmody know is that Amazon is constantly being misread by proximity. We in books and publishing are so close to the trunk or the ear of the elephant that we often see Amazon solely as a big bookstore in the sky instead of as the sprawling retail and services tech giant it is—with AWS (Amazon Web Services) running vast cloud platforms for governments as well as corporations through server farms located around the world.
In his first weekly edition of The Amazon Chronicles, Carmody points out that you need not have money (let alone book sales) invested in Amazon to care about its financial announcements, because a quarterly earnings statement is “one of four times in the year when the company has to be relatively transparent about what it’s up to.” His top-line observations from the January 31 Amazon earnings statement include a look at how “Amazon is 20 percent of a Facebook in ads, and only getting bigger”; and that Jeff Bezos’s commentary was focused on the Alexa technology, indicating a likely future focus on Alexa for the company.
Carmody points out that Amazon has long fought an impression “that it’s just a retailer”—or that it’s merely a clever acquirer of data or a logistics innovator or a bottomless bookstore. Rather, it wants to be seen as a high-tech company such as Google or Microsoft. In truth, Amazon is an elephant in technology, and Carmody’s first newsletter is a look at the whole animal.
We asked Carmody if he’d spotted anything of particular interest to authors in the latest earnings statement. “Libraries,” Carmody said. “One note that jumps out at me is Amazon’s relative lack of penetration in libraries, either in print or ebooks. [Research and consulting group] Ithaka S+R’s report puts Amazon as the second largest distributor of print books to university libraries, but well behind [its competitors]. University plus public libraries together is a huge potential market, but Amazon just isn’t configured as an institutional seller of books. … This means that if you self-publish a book with Amazon, it’s just not likely to reach a user through a library.” (See our Links of Interest for more.)
Bottom line: Carmody’s new Amazon Chronicles provides that wider perspective on Amazon not often discussed in publishing-industry circles. Carmody’s writings are comprehensive and parsed for you in terms of importance and angle. The current subscription rate is $5 monthly, but that, Carmody says, will fall away once he has 200 subscribers. We’re sending a warm welcome to an analytical tool we’ve all needed since the beginning of … Prime.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
