The Book Business: Will the medium dictate the message?

Let’s say you’re looking for book recommendations and head to Goodreads.com to see what’s good (even though you could as easily go to my site!). Sidestepping the ones with the one-star ratings and bad reviews, you find a few books by new authors that have good reviews. You order them on Amazon, Kindle or Audible. Well done! You’re just the kind of reader Amazon’s looking for.

After all, they own each of these platforms (from Goodreads which deal in reviews, to Amazon, Kindle and Audible which deliver books to you in your preferred form. What’s more, they own the means of production as well - Kindle Direct Publishing and Amazon Publishing). So, you’ve paid for a book and provided them with vital market research data on what sells, so that they can tailor their future publications to those parameters. Is that necessarily a bad thing? Let’s put a pin in that and return to it later.

THE BEGINNING OF AMAZON

Amazon started selling books online in 1994. Jeff Bezos picked books as his product of choice because in comparison to all the things one could sell online, books offer a unique advantage. In an interview recorded in June 1997, Bezos said, 

“There are more items in the book category than there are items in any other category, by far.”

Think about it. Nobody who buys books (except those who buy three aesthetically pleasing ones to place on their coffee table) ever thinks that since they have 20 books, they don’t need any more. Setting aside consumables, only a miniscule number of products possess this quality. Bezos went on to name the other product that shared this quality,

“Music is No. 2 — there are about 200,000 active music CDs at any given time. But in the book space, there are over 3 million different books worldwide active in print at any given time across all languages, [and] more than 1.5 million in English alone.”

As with anything, where there is a positive, there is a downside too. The book business is a business with a long tail. Which is another way of saying that there are significant profits to be made by selling books that are relatively hard to find because they aren’t bestsellers. Most brick-and-mortar bookstores don’t find it feasible to stock them since they don’t sell as much as the latest thriller and as such, are a waste of precious space.

THE LONG TAIL OF THE BOOK BUSINESS

The term long tail was coined by Chris Anderson. He argued that products in less demand and with low sales volume, provided they were numerous enough (as is the case with books and music), can collectively make up a market share which rivals or exceeds the individual sales of a relatively small number of bestsellers.

The fly in this particular ointment is that an inventory of millions of titles requires lots of storage space. And real estate costs money. That’s where the internet comes in as the ideal distribution channel. It allows a seller to have a gigantic warehouse on the outskirts of a small town, instead of a tiny bookstore in a high-traffic area in the city, with a monthly rent that has them considering selling their organs on the black market. It’s the perfect mix - a vast inventory with a storefront convenient for customers. After all, it's right there on your phone. That’s why Amazon is online.

A BUYER’S MARKET

The focus of this post is not Amazon’s online presence. Instead, it seeks to figure out what it means to any sector of business when one company takes over almost all aspects of the industry and uses that omnipresence to becomes a monopsony.

The word monopsony is a recent addition to my vocabulary. It is a mirror image of the word monopoly with one key difference. While in a monopoly, there is only one seller who can charge as they see fit, a monopsony is a market with only one buyer, who can purchase at whatever price they like. Which is why the dwindling numbers of publishers is a concern for writers and eventually, readers.

THE DIMINISHING RETURNS OF THE SELF-PUBLISHING BOOM

You could say the decline of traditional publishers isn’t really a problem since so many authors are choosing to self-publish. You’re partially correct. Let's see how this plays out. At the moment, most authors who choose to self-publish are getting a bigger slice of the revenue pie than they would if they went with a traditional publisher (with the exception of some bestselling authors).

However, that may not always be the case. Especially when all other publishers are pushed out of the game. In fact, you don’t have to wait that long to see the direction in which things are headed. As of July 2022, the Kindle Direct Publishing payout per page read in the United States was $0.0043. In July 2015, the payout per page was $0.0058. That’s a 25% drop over a 7-year period. 

WILL BOOKS BECOME JUST ANOTHER PRODUCT?

What creative freedom and quality of writing can we expect when editors are replaced by managers who are guided solely by spreadsheets and the prospect of profit? I am not imagining this authorial dystopia. Authors commissioned by Amazon’s imprints like Thomas and Mercer and Kindle Press who choose to put their books on Kindle Unlimited are compensated per page read. That, per se, is not the problem.

However, since these e-readers collect every possible data point, it is safe to conclude that there is an end use in mind for all that data. It doesn’t take much imagination to think that authors and editors may tailor their works to get more page views instead of honing the story, theme or characterisation. I am reminded of a scene from the Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks film, You’ve Got Mail where Tom Hanks' character sarcastically compares books to a “ten-gallon vat of olive oil”. Let’s hope it won’t come to that.

You could argue that market demand has always played a role in which genre or writer is promoted over another. You’re right. The difference now is the amount of pinpointed data that is available to publishers. It is, quite frankly, unprecedented. When in history have the publishers of any book known at which page did a reader close the book never to open it again?

CONCLUSION

There have always been folks who write solely for money and some who write as an expression of their creativity, and good writing is not the sole domain of either.

It is one thing for the earnings of a Wuthering Heights to be eclipsed by the royalties of a Fifty Shades of Grey. That’s fine and has probably already happened. However, what a loss it would be for us all if the next Animal Farm or Fahrenheit 451 are not published because they’re deemed ‘unviable’ by a manager or worse, a software looking solely for the next blockbuster mediocrity.

Good luck finding something good to read then. Especially on Goodreads.