Last week I began talking a bit about Amazon Studios, Amazon’s 20-month-old initiative to find and produce new movie and series scripts. In that post I posted on the advantages and opportunities of crowdsourced material. Today’s post looks at the business advantages Amazon brings to bear.

Customer comprehension
In most of their efforts, judging by sales, Amazon seems to get where their customers are coming from and what they really want. They came to dominate the book market because they presented customers with the buying experience and advantages they wanted (huge selection, simple and effective searching, lower prices, affordable shipping). They became a sell-anything behemoth by applying the same principles they used to sell books to, well, practically everything.

Their original Kindle succeeded extravagantly; the Kindle Fire, a very different device, also took off, and among authors their eBook store is close to the only one that matters. It seems to me that Amazon’s principles here are to focus on wide selection, good search tools, and an affordable price point, and that formula has delivered for them again and again. I have no reason to believe they’ll do anything differently–or need to–as they start bringing out movies and series.

Well-suited distribution channels
We tend to think of series as things we watch on television and of movies as things we watch in movie theaters, but increasingly we’re watching these things on our computers, tablets, Rokus, and other devices.  Can Amazon get movies in theaters and series on TV channels? Absolutely. Much smaller and less well-funded production companies do it all the time. Will Amazon need to do this? Maybe not.

I don’t feel I can predict how much our viewing habits might migrate away from movie theaters and TV stations. After all, both of these industries have survived massive changes in the last few decades, and I don’t know that further changes will necessarily swamp the boat for either one. For instance, even though I’ll eventually be able to watch virtually any movie I want on DVD and/or through streaming, I still see movies in theaters sometimes because of the big screen experience, and because sometimes I want to see the film as soon as it’s released.

However, it’s clear that people are ready and willing to watch movies and series through streaming, and Amazon already has a successful streaming service that it could expand or build on in a number of ways. It’s also clear that streaming is getting more and more popular compared to other modes of watching, and while this upward trend may eventually plateau, it’s likely streaming is here to stay, at least until the next game-changing paradigm comes along.

Familiar with success
So unlike literally every other movie and TV studio in the world, Amazon has a massive, successful, existing distribution channel, not to mention their own device, the Kindle Fire, out in the world to stream to (along with many other non-Amazon viewing devices, of course). None of this is any guarantee of success, and there are any number of companies that have dropped the ball on opportunities that were just as promising–but Amazon isn’t just any company.

Compare them to Google, for instance, which often seems to be just trying anything that looks popular. “How about a virtual world (Google Lively)? No, I guess that didn’t work. Now let’s make something called Google Wave and see if anyone can fully understand it! Huh, I guess not that either. Well, let’s try to out-Facebook Facebook! Hmm, hard to tell whether that’s going to survive or not. Well, good thing some of our other core offerings, like search and maps, are so excellent, and that we drive the software behind some of the world’s best smartphones.”

Amazon, on the other hand, seems to succeed with virtually every major effort they undertake. I have every reason to think they’ll succeed in this one too, even though it’s as much of a stretch as the Kindle was–and maybe more of one. If anyone can make that stretch, it’s Amazon.

In my next Amazon Studios post, I’ll offer a look at the possibility’s from the writer’s point of view. Is Amazon Studios a golden opportunity, a one-way ticket to tooldom, or a little of both?

Photo by evadedave

I’ve been discussing the relative merits of traditional publishing compared to self-publishing with writer friends for some time now. Self-publishing would not have been something I gave any real thought to a couple of years ago, but the game has clearly changed now that eBooks have kicked into high gear. While eBook quantities sold are still a fraction of physical book quantities, they represent such a different approach to publishing and so much more profit per volume–even when sold at lower prices–that they have become rule-changers both in terms of the economics of publishing and in terms of writing itself. eBooks can easily accommodate varied forms, lengths, and sub-genres; slow sales; and small niche audiences in a way that physical books generally are not able to do to.

But there are many advantages to traditional publishing as well, by which I mean the process of writing a book that can be marketed in bookstores, getting an agent (usually), and selling the book to a publisher, who then produces the book and gets it out to distributors, who in turn get them to bookstores.

“Tradpub” and “Selfpub”
We haven’t needed a special term in the past for traditional publishing, but since the need to distinguish has arisen, I’ve found “traditional publishing” the most comfortable and easiest to communicate. An alternative I like for its brevity is “tradpub.”

A writer friend pointed out that apparently, PublishAmerica has used the term “traditional publishing” in a pejorative way and suggested that “commercial publishing” might be a better term. However, PublishAmerica has some serious credibility issues, and using the term “commercial publishing” for large publishing houses kind of implies that selfpubbing isn’t a business, which in many cases it very much is. Perhaps this argues further for the relatively baggage-less “selfpub” and “tradpub.”

“Self-publishing” is a term that has a bad taste for many professional and aspiring writers, as self-publishing in the past has been a refuge for many, many books that were simply not good enough for traditional publishing, along with a small minority of good books, often ones written for small, niche markets. Again there’s a short version I like, in part because it doesn’t carry all of the baggage of the longer term: “selfpub.” Some people use the term “indie publishing,” and while I find this perfectly acceptable, I don’t often use it myself because it feels like a euphemism, in part because “indie” movies and music tend to involve a group of people, whereas “indie publishing” is generally just a single person publishing his or her own work. As much as I like the idea of an indie author being like an indie filmmaker, I don’t think the comparison is quite apt.

Choosing tradpub or selfpub
These days, the difference between tradpub and selfpub could easily be mistaken for the difference between physical books and eBooks, but thinking this way is misleading, since of course many traditional publishers are beginning to embrace eBook editions (or at least to permit them), while selfpubbers have access to POD (print on demand) services that make their books competitive with other physical books.

Here are some of the advantages of each approach to publication, all from the writer’s point of view. Note that the tradpub section refers to large publishing houses; small press publishers are a bit different.

TRADPUB

1. Often some promotion is provided by the publisher, including access to review venues, bestseller lists, awards, etc. that won’t include selfpubbed books
2. Professional design services at publisher’s expense
3. Sales and fulfillment done by publisher
4. Book is more reputable with review venues, booksellers, the small percentage of readers who care, etc.
5. Better pricing and availability of physical books
6. Sometimes, editing at publisher’s expense
7. Gatekeeping–the traditional publishing process at its best can prevent books of yours that aren’t ready from being published prematurely, while validating books that are ready.
8. Sometimes, other rights sell (foreign, film, etc.)
9. Assured of making a minimum amount of money
10. Library distribution
11. Sense of accomplishment and validation
12. Externally-imposed deadlines helpful to productivity for some writers

SELFPUB

1. Much quicker time to market
2. No long period of waiting to see whether or not the book will sell
3. No agency 15% taken off writer’s income
4. Much higher royalty rate paid to writer
5. Accommodates unusual and niche books well
6. No need to connect with some specific agent’s and editor’s tastes (as well as the marketing department, management, etc.)
7. Control over process: no covers you hate, no misreporting or non-reporting of royalties from publisher, no unnecessary publisher delays, etc.
8. Stay in print longer
9. Rights not tied up or snatched by publisher, as can sometimes happen in non-writer-friendly publishing contracts
10. Ability to update book after release
11. Much quicker payment and possibility of steady, comparably reliable income
12. Much better reporting on sales and money earned
13. Books can be commercially viable with a significantly smaller readership and/or much slower sales
14. Satisfaction and confidence arising from self-reliance
15. No risk of series being canceled before they’re completed
16. Don’t have to sell the idea of the work; can focus on selling the actual work
17. Selfpub (especially self-ePublishing) seems to be on the rise, whereas tradpub’s future is uncertain and not rosy: in theory, some publishers might even go out of business between the time they buy your book and the time they intended to publish it
18. No danger of agent having rights to something they didn’t sell (as happens with certain kinds of unfavorable-to-author agency contracts)
19. Not constrained or rushed by publisher timelines

I’d offer the caution that the fact that there are more items in the selfpub list doesn’t necessarily mean that selfpub is better; I believe strongly that this depends on the individual writer’s circumstances.

Another caution I’d offer, one that will bear repeating, is that simply because a book is ePublished doesn’t mean anyone will buy it. Based on numerical analysis writers I know have been doing on Amazon, for instance, the great majority of ePublished books are selling very few to no copies. There appear to be a huge number that have never sold at all. In this arena, the confidence of a publisher and the strength of the traditional marketing route offers almost a guarantee of at least a small audience, while selfpub offers nothing at all like a guarantee.