Question

Amazon and many other publishers now offer self publishing online. What exactly it is that Amazon is attempting to do as e-publishers (i.e., the business model that they are using) and discuss the impact you believe they will have on the publishing industry. Be sure to include a discussion of the impact on quality, price, and the overall industry. INCLUDE A LINK to some research online.

Answer 1

Excellent question
I have myself published on Amazon website

Let's understand some things about amazon publisher

1. With Amazon Publishing, your books will not be in bookstores.

I run an online group for LU authors and invariably the first question everyone asks is “I heard I won’t be in bookstores, is this really true?” Yes. Like every rule, this has an exception. First of all, Amazon is a bookstore—the largest in the world by far. It will be prominently displayed there and marketed through their many channels. Certain big box stores like Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club might take your title. Ditto your local Indie if you have a good relationship with them, or B&N if you plan an event there. But you have to be okay with this being the exception and not the rule.

2. Amazon Publishing is now one of the big six publishers.

You always used to hear about the ‘Big Six’ before the Random-Penguin merger. Now they call it the Big Five, but they are not counting Amazon. It is clearly in their leagues, from editorial to production to overall units sold. You are not self-publishing. Other than the marketing channels, everything about the Amazon experience can be found in a big publishing house. They just have some extra (awesome) stuff the others don’t.

3. Your book will not be on bestseller lists.

This is the second question I always get asked. And by that I mean the New York Times. Based on sales, Hidden should have been #2 on the e-book bestseller list for many weeks. It was not because the NYT doesn’t count Amazon reported sales if the book only sells in one channel, like Amazon Pub titles do. This is changing too. The Wall Street Journal now does include Amazon Pub titles, and maybe the others will change eventually. But right now, your book might be selling the most and you will see that on Amazons’ lists, but not others.

4. Amazon Publishing has user friendly royalty statements.

When I get my statements from my other publishers, I still often have to speak to my agent to understand them. Amazon’s monthly statements are straightforward and easy to understand. And yeah, they are monthly, not every six months. At the end of September I will receive the royalty statement for August. Real time reporting!

5. Amazon Publishing provides daily sales data.

You read that right. If you are published through Amazon you can get daily sales data for most sales through their author central portal. That can be a good and a bad thing, of course, as it is easy to become obsessed.

6. Amazon Publishing has some amazing levers it can pull.

Amazon is a company that knows how to move units. It has developed and continues to develop various methods of promoting books like the Kindle First program, special offers for Kindle Fire owners, targeting emailing etc. From what I understand, every Amazon published book gets a basic marketing package that would cost most publishers thousands of dollars to replicate. That means actual advertising as opposed to just promotion which is the limit of what many authors get these days.

7. Amazon Publishing will not necessarily pull all its levers for you.

Like all publishers, Amazon still has to make choices about which books they will give extra support to and when. They have lead titles and can choose to hit your book with what I call The Pretty Stick™ or not. That being said, if a book does well, they are quick to re-act and add additional promotion to keep it going. They will also adjust when their traditional methods are not working for a particular title.

8. Amazon Publishing marketing has a long tail.

Most publishers market a book for six weeks after publication. Amazon’s approach is different. [Like this quote? Click here to Tweet and share it!] Hidden is still being included in promotions more than two years after it published.

9. Amazon Publishing works best for writers with multiple books.

The positives of Amazon’s system are skewed, in my view, to authors with multiple titles. I do not mean by this that a debut author cannot do well. Several have done very well. But Amazon’s metrics and reader knowledge come into play more and more the more books you have out there. So if you are a book a year writer, or a writer who already has several titles published, you might see benefits to publishing with Amazon that writers who are on a longer time frame may not.

10. Amazon Publishing is still a Publisher.

Don’t get me wrong – I have had a fantastic experience with Amazon and will be eternally grateful for them reviving my career and taking my books to the next level. But as I mentioned above, they have to make choices. And they don’t always share their reasoning. Like any publisher, sometimes their authors can be disappointed with the results. This is life in publishing. If you want total control, self-publish.

And Amazon Publishing is a culture-making juggernaut, even if the literati don’t much think about it. According to Peter Hildick-Smith, the CEO of the book-industry analysis firm the Codex Group, roughly 25.5 million U.S. households bought books in the past month, and fully a quarter of those households use Prime Reading, a feature of Amazon Prime that allows subscribers to borrow 10 items at a time from a catalog of 1,000 ebooks, magazines, and other media, including the tech giant’s originals.

Prime Reading is far from Amazon’s only reading subscription service. Kindle Unlimited, a similar program, costs an extra $9.99 and offers a wider selection of millions of titles.** The Prime Book Box for children includes a selection of age-appropriate books delivered regularly for $19.99. Amazon First Reads allows members to download a book a month earlier than the unsubscribed public for no extra cost. Often, First Reads are—you guessed it—Amazon Publishing titles, and they rocket up the Amazon best-seller charts as soon as they’re made available; A Fire Sparkling and What You Did both topped the charts in early July despite being due out August 1.

And then there’s Amazon’s 19 brick-and-mortar stores around the country, which sell print copies of Amazon Publishing titles, produced via a sophisticated print-on-demand operation.*** All told, these services overlap to create an ecosystem with the same aim and model as Prime: to lock customers into a regular subscription that shifts the center of their purchasing gravity to Amazon. The company’s distribution mechanisms then allow it to push its own titles to subscribers to keep them happy with their membership—not unlike how Netflix’s recommendation algorithm tells you to watch Netflix-produced films.

Amazon Publishing is still a relatively small fry: According to Hildick-Smith, it puts out 1,100 titles a year, compared with the 1,500 to 2,000 a large publishing house such as Simon & Schuster might publish. Estimating sales for those 1,100 titles is difficult, according to experts, because the tech giant doesn’t disclose ebook sales numbers for its original books, and its proprietary methods of distribution obscure those figures from the third-party researchers who determine best-seller lists.

Grace Doyle, the editor who oversees the Amazon Publishing mystery/thriller imprint, Thomas & Mercer, and the science fiction/fantasy label, 47North, says the subsidiary looks at three things when measuring the success of a title: the book’s sales, the number of people who actually read it (Amazon maintains a “most read” chart, measured by ebook pages turned), and whether the company can expect more books to come from its relationship with the author. She said again and again in our interview that her goal was to maintain partnerships with authors for as long as possible, which often results in publishing series, especially for the thrillers and mysteries that do so well with ebook readers.

Indeed, Amazon Publishing knows its readers and has pursued their appetites since its inception. Jeff Belle, the vice president of Amazon Publishing, acknowledged their tastes in a 2011 interview: “Our customers are voracious readers of genre fiction.” (Amazon declined to make Belle or other Amazon executives available for an interview.) Those readers don’t luxuriate in individual books or pay much attention to the tastes of New York literary gatekeepers. Fans of romances and thrillers, Hildick-Smith says, tend to race through books quickly, which makes Amazon’s easily accessible ebooks and borrowing programs especially appealing to them. A duo writing under the pen name Alexa Riley told The Atlantic last year that they published three books a month to keep pace with demand.

Many authors seem to love Amazon Publishing. Robert Dugoni, who has written 10 mystery and thriller novels for Amazon, inked a deal with the company in 2013, after becoming dissatisfied with the amount of advertising his previous publisher, Simon & Schuster, put behind his books. Amazon Publishing, he says, still promotes the opener of his ongoing mystery/thriller series, My Sister’s Grave, a six-year-old book, in Kindle Store promotions; Dugoni says he’s sold 1.5 million copies of that title and 5 million copies of all his books with Amazon Publishing since 2013. The “hunger” of Amazon Publishing’s employees, along with its reams of customer data and speedy editing process, impressed him, he says, to the point that he recently appeared in one of its marketing videos.

“They’re constantly reinventing marketing and promotion to keep my name and my books in front of readers,” Dugoni told me. “From an author’s perspective, that’s all I ever wanted: people to read my books.” Doyle called Amazon’s success with Dugoni—a reinvigoration of an established author who wasn’t selling well elsewhere—“emblematic of our goals.” In January, Mark Sullivan, an author who writes historical fiction and mysteries, relayed a similar story of a career revived by Amazon Publishing.

Read: The authors who love Amazon

But experts who spoke with me said that the publishing house serves not authors but another master—Amazon Prime.

“Selling Prime memberships and keeping people within the universe of Amazon is one of the strongest business drivers they have,” says Kristen McLean, who tracks the publishing industry as an executive director with the books unit of the retail-data company the NPD Group. “Their strategy not just with books but with everything they own is constantly reinforcing that Prime membership.”

To put it another way, Amazon uses its book-publishing arm the same way it does the streaming service Prime Video. The company doesn’t sell its original video programming on a per-unit basis; it’s available, along with a laundry list of other perks, to anyone who subscribes for $119 a year to Amazon Prime. For example, the historical fiction show The Man in the High Castle attracted 8 million viewers and 1.15 million new Prime subscribers, according to a 2018 Reuters report.

Prime subscribers are so valuable to Amazon because they spend more in the long run: Jeff Bezos has said that people who stream videos on Amazon convert from free trials and renew their Prime subscriptions at higher rates than those who don’t. He put it bluntly in 2016: “When we win a Golden Globe, it helps us sell more shoes.”

Book readers are the same. Content is the hook; commerce is the goal. If users join Prime for early access to a new title by their favorite author, rather than buying a one-off copy of the book, they become much more likely to purchase other things on Amazon—couches, clothes, cutlery, etc.—to take advantage of the membership. Bezos said in 2015, “It’s how our whole model works. When someone joins Prime, the more they buy of everything we sell.” That is to say, when the Amazon Publishing original You Are (Not) Small won the 2015 Theodor Seuss Geisel Award, one of the most prestigious for children’s books, diaper sales presumably skyrocketed. (Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment on sales spikes correlated with awards. Amazon Publishing titles are not exclusive to Prime.)

So it’s perhaps unsurprising that Amazon is taking an interest in courting household names. The chart-topping thriller writer Dean Koontz unveiled a five-book deal with Thomas & Mercer in late July. At the end of May, the actor and writer Mindy Kaling announced that her third book would be an Amazon exclusive, free to Kindle Unlimited and Prime subscribers. Amazon also acquired the rights to the recent film Late Night, which Kaling wrote, produced, and starred in. Her moves hint at an entwined multimedia partnership not unlike the star-studio partnerships of the golden age of Hollywood. (A representative for Kaling did not respond to a request for comment.)

The larger aims of Amazon at times appear to dictate Amazon Publishing’s moves. As Amazon’s e-commerce business attempts to establish a foothold in the gargantuan Indian market, the writer Chetan Bhagat, dubbed the “biggest-selling English-language novelist in India’s history” by The New York Times, has signed a six-book deal with the company. He broke off a 14-year association with his previous publisher to ally himself with Amazon.



Just like Amazon Prime and Netflix and Hotstar, Amazon and similar players are trying to build something like that for books.
This will very soon be picked up by Flipkart, Jio, My Airtel and companies who are moving into multiple sectors simultaneously

Amazon will now know the reading pattern, what kind of books you like to read and how much time you spend reading, would you be a potential buyer if yes then for what genre.
Do write ?
Want to publish, Think of amazon
they want to move into every sector and want to be the top most player.
Amazon started with books selling company and now they want to become best in picking up publishers too.
It;s just another platform economy model in publishing segment