Authors and Publishers and Agents mash it up in new ways as the book business gets remade. The reallocation of risks and rewards happens as self-publishing, e-books, and the current economies of scale with new digital technologies encroaches on the crumbling financial houses of traditional publishing. Agents without advances these days from trade publishers now retool to manage and administrate the self-publishing initiatives of authors. Good authors whose profits will generate a percentage return to the agent are accepted as clients for the first time. And authors are self-publishing in great numbers. Traditional publishing companies increasingly offer custom publishing in competition with the online electronic book publishing options. Amazon moved into this self-publishing mode and authors realized new profit margins. One caveat: these self-publishering ventures make money from authors, not from selling books. Authors sell books.

Amazon makes it so easy to share links with book cover images and if you’re a Prime member there is an incentive to shop on Amazon. There is just one big problem. Books and Amazon. When you purchase books from Amazon you get a deep discount and the publisher pays the author even less in copyright royalties. A percentage of pennies is a pittance and Amazon knows it. That’s why they keep selling books without making a profit. Books are their loss leaders and they make their money on selling your data and selling you other products online. Amazon’s profit margins come from the cloud. Big data. You are being bought by Amazon. As an (aspiring) author you may want to make more informed decisions with your dollars during the holiday book-buying season. When you shop at independently owned bookstore, you and other authors benefit in terms of your copyright royalties. Author’s Guild currently has a Fair Contract Initiative in progress. This campaign includes an effort to eliminate the “deep discount” clauses publishers to booksellers and wholesalers at big markdowns. It seems fair that when a publisher sells a book at a deep discount, the author’s take might be reduced proportionally. But there’s no proportionality in many standard “deep discount” clauses. When you shop at an independently owned business, your entire community benefits: Spend $100 at a local and $68 of that stays in your community. Spend the same $100 at a national chain, and your community only sees $43.…

Publishing is a business. Books are products. When you want to publish your book you need to understand that you are introducing a new product into a crowded market with decreasing demand. The number of books published each year has exploded. The average number of sales for each book continues to decline, despite the increasing number of titles published. For every spot available in bookstore shelf space, there are close to 1,000 titles competing for that space. For example, the number of titles stocked in any bookstore in the section where your book might belong is likely between 100 (independent bookstores) and 1,500 (Barnes & Noble superstores), yet there are hundreds of thousands of books in print which fight for that limited shelf space. You’re not only competing against other new products in the market, but against all the other books in your niche which have previously been published. Selling books has also changed for the publishing industry. The same effort to bring a book to market today as ten years ago will yield a fraction of the sales previously experienced by authors. The intellectual real estate market has never recovered from the 2008-2009 Great Recession. Publishers have shifted their acquisition strategy to sign fewer books with expectations for higher volume sales. In other words, they are looking for blockbusters and this means many great books are passed over. Changes in the market also mean authors can expect lower advances, or no advance. Publishers pay an advance on copyright royalties.…