RSSAuthors Feeling the Pinch
Authors are between a rock and a hard place, as today’s TechCrunch piece by Paul Carr illustrates. He describes how Amazon customers expressed their displeasure at the lack of a Kindle version of Michael Lewis bestseller The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, by giving 1-star reviews of the book, even though they hadn’t read it. They were so upset that W.W. Norton, the publisher, had elected to “embargo” the Kindle version, milking sales of the hardcover version as long as possible.
For Carr, this sort of customer activism is problematic. He understands customer annoyance at W.W. Norton’s antiquated belief that denying customers what they want is actually good business strategy. But as a published author, he feels for authors whose books are impugned because of these business decisions:
I speak from pained experience as an author when I say that we have absolutely no say on when our books are released, in what format and at what price.
As an author you are beholden to a big publisher like W.W. Norton. You place your hard work in their care and hope that they’ll understand your audience. You hope that they will stop thinking of themselves as publishers of printed books, and start thinking of themselves as purveyors of your work, in whatever printed or digital form it might appear.
You’re also beholden to Amazon. You’re almost asking to get stepped on as the online goliath battles the titans of old world publishing. You are in the middle. They fight over pricing and distribution, while you hope that somehow, miraculously you will emerge from their duel unscathed.
If you’re an author, published or not, it’s time to realize that business as usual doesn’t favor you. It’s not about you. It’s about big publishers trying to stave off the future, and Amazon trying to control it. Meanwhile, they’re both pissing off your customers.
So try something different.
