Competition may be in the air this summer—from Brexit, Wimbledon, and the UEFA European Championship to the political conventions, the Olympics, and Pokémon GO-ing all over the GPS-ed landscape.
Since our last edition of The Hot Sheet, competing energies in the indie sector have prompted Orna Ross of Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi) to talk of “Self-Publishing 2.0”—a maturing concept of the crowded indie author world.
Quick background: the context for a 2.0 question was illuminated in recent comments from Jon Fine, formerly Amazon’s director of author and publisher relations. Fine sees two groups of authors: those going for commercial market success and those driven by the love of storytelling, not sales goals.
Such divisions of intent meant that Ross created “a furor” when she established a discussion forum for ALLi’s Professional Membership “power authors” who sell 50,000 or more copies per year. Ross found herself fielding charges of elitism between what one commenter calls “the pulp pile” and the “power group.”
Ross says the actual competition that the 2.0 indie field needs to face now is an “erosion in terms and conditions for self-publishers.” The Hot Sheet asked her to elaborate on where she sees indies losing ground in terms and conditions, and it turns out she’s looking at two areas of Amazon: Kindle Unlimited (KU) and ACX/Audible. Here are her comments to us:
On KU: “The introduction of KU was the first time Amazon made completely different terms and conditions for self-published authors, who must be exclusive to Amazon to be included, aside from a few authors for whom an exception is made. And self-publishers are paid based on pages read, from a pool set by Amazon each month, while trade publishing is offered the same per-download payment as before, without any exclusivity requirement. Still, unlike self-publishers, who have flocked to KU, very few trade publishers are in KU, fearing the ultimate effect of the subscription model on their profits.
“For authors, there have been some winners and some losers as KU moved to payment per page read, but more fundamentally problematic is the exclusivity requirement. Non-exclusivity is hugely important for self-publishers’ ability to retain control over income.”
On Audible and ACX: “We are seeing this [problem with exclusivity] clearly in the arena of audiobooks, where authors who want to work exclusively with ACX—which controls 90+ percent of the market, through Audible, Amazon, and iTunes—must sign a seven-year exclusive contract that also signs away control over pricing. Commission rates were initially high to compensate, starting at 50 percent and escalating to 90 percent, but were then reduced, without explanation, to a flat 40 percent—20 percent for non-exclusive.
“And this in a trading environment where author-publishers cannot run sales, choose categories or keywords, or change metadata. And Audible can and does discount the set price at any time. We believe it’s a very poor deal for authors—and even worse for our voice artist collaborators who agree to a royalty-split deal.
“KU adds to the income erosion, as Amazon widely promotes their Whispersync technology, which allows the reader to move from ebook to audio and back again, syncing to furthest page read or listened to. The reader is offered a sharp discount on the audiobook if it is purchased or borrowed in conjunction with the ebook.
“So if the readers are in Prime, they borrow the ebook as part of their subscription but may never open it or read very little—so the self-publisher receives no payment for the ebook—while the audiobook can be acquired for a fraction of the price the self-publisher set, and on which they based their P&L. This makes it very challenging for a self-publisher to recoup their initial investment and move to profit.
“Until the commission reduction, audiobooks were the second most lucrative format for most self-publishers, not as good as ebooks but better than print. Arguably no longer. We are currently investigating this within the ALLi membership.”
Elsewhere in this issue we have more coverage on KU, which starts its third year this month. And we have news as well on Audible’s latest offering.
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.
