Amazon Publishing has often been overshadowed by author activity and success on the self-publishing platform Kindle Direct (KDP). That’s changing.
Speaking of Kindle Worlds and Kindle Scout being shuttered by Amazon, we see a parallel gain in traction for Amazon Publishing (APub), a potential sixth among the Big Five trade publishers. As most Hot Sheet readers know, APub isn’t the KDP self-publishing platform, although some of APub’s 15 imprints have at times worked with authors who self-published using KDP. French and German translations of works by JA Konrath, for example, have been published by the imprint AmazonCrossing.
With the sales muscle of Amazon retail backing the output of Amazon Publishing, APub’s footprint is widening. Four of the top 20 bestselling ebooks on Amazon Charts for the week of May 20 are from Amazon Publishing imprints.
As Two Lions, one of APub’s two imprints for children, turns five years old, it is celebrating its Geisel Award–winning team of Anna Kang and illustrator Chris Weyant, whose Not series—You Are (Not) Small, That’s (Not) Mine, and I Am (Not) Scared—have reached 200,000 readers in print and digital. Two Lions is also home to the Marshall Cavendish catalog that APub acquired in 2012. One of its titles, What If Everybody Did That? by Ellen Javernick, has reached 240,000 readers across digital and print since the acquisition.
You’ll notice that the numbers given above indicate how many readers have been reached—not how many books have been sold. There are many cases in which a title is read as part of a subscription program and accessed rather than sold; some titles are marketed in ways only available to Amazon. While many recall Amazon Publishing’s difficulty with lack of bookstore access for such high-profile writers as Tim Ferriss in 2012, that lack of access doesn’t necessarily deter significant and experienced writers. Just on Tuesday (May 29), it was announced that APub imprint Thomas & Mercer had closed a two-book deal with bestselling author Patricia Cornwell, and will launch a new series from the writer in late 2019.
Bottom line: Established in 2009, Amazon Publishing is more aggressively asserting itself, aided by the increasingly sophisticated power of Amazon retail. The Two Lions imprint started quietly five years ago and now is yielding books sold into the EU, Australia, and Japan—and the imprint is starting to bring foreign works into English. Unlike Kindle Scout and Kindle Worlds, which produced titles that were limited in format and distribution (Worlds’ content could only be sold in the US), APub imprints offer print, ebook, and often audio editions that can be sold globally. APub books also sell at higher prices than self-pub work, presumably with a better margin.
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.
