So, anyone who follows the publishing industry has heard about the throwdown between Macmillan Publishing and Amazon today. I think there’s a lot of insanity from both sides, but it sounds like it went something like this.
Macmillan: Hey, Amazon, we’re not so thrilled that you’re price-fixing eBooks for the Kindle. Since iPad is going to take over the world, uhm…yeah…we’re gonna need you to go ahead and up the prices on Macmillan ebooks. All of them. Also, we’re pretty sure that Steve Jobs can kick Jeff Bezos’s butt in a cage match.
Amazon: Yeah…no.
Macmillan: Well, we’re at an impasse then. Because that means we won’t let you carry our eBooks. So, there.
Amazon: Uhm…while we’re at it, why don’t we make it ALL your books. Paper ones, too?
Macmillan: Uhm…
Amazon: Tell Steve Jobs it’s on.
Macmillan: Shit.
Ok…so there’s some crazysauce on both sides of this debate. And I don’t really know who was more ridiculous in the discussion, because, frankly, Macmillan shouldn’t have been so astoundingly short sighted, and Amazon shouldn’t have been such a bully. BUT…what I do know is this: Authors who publish with Macmillan (or any of the imprints of Macmillan, like Tor, Farrar Straus & Giroux, Holt, and St. Martin’s) are pretty well screwed by this news…because for a lot of authors, Amazon accounts for the lion’s share of their sales.
So…without further ado…I give you Nine Books You Should Buy From Not Amazon. All of these books are published by Macmillan. And, yes. Some of these authors are my friends…because I want them to be able to eat. I think it’s important to stress how INCREDIBLY vast the impact of this kind of major publishing event is–it impacts authors from all genres…as you can see from the list below.
1. Elizabeth Strout’s, Olive Kitteridge (Literary Fiction & Winner of the Pulitzer Prize)2. Lisa Kleypas’s, Blue-Eyed Devil (Contemporary Romance)
3. Lisa Mantchev’s Eyes Like Stars (YA)
4. Polly Frost’s Deep Inside (Erotic Horror)
5. Liel Leibovitz’s Aliya: Three Generations of American-Jewish Immigration to Israel (Nonfiction)
6. Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum series (Bestselling Mystery)
7. Natalie Babbit’s Tuck Everlasting (Children’s & one of my favorite books of all time)
8. Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (Historical Fiction & Winner of the Booker Prize)
9. Deva Fagan’s Fortune’s Folly (Middle Grade Fiction)
Really, team? We can’t get it together and reach some kind of agreement?
ETA: There are, of course, thousands of other authors impacted by this insanity. Visit the Macmillan website to look for more.
January 31st, 2010 at 12:50 am
The Da Vinci Code?!?!
This whole thing is mighty strange.
What's weird is they took down one of my faves of 2009, Courtney Summer's Cracked Up to Be, but still have up the bargain version.
January 31st, 2010 at 1:07 am
Even though I've been following this all day, I didn't realize the breadth of Macmillan's lineup. Thanks for the amazing dialog above, I laughed more than once :o)
January 31st, 2010 at 2:25 am
I HATE ebooks and HATE that fighting over ebooks is limiting the availability of print books. I will be doing my online shopping at B&N and Book Depository from now on.
January 31st, 2010 at 2:40 am
Hopefully, Amazon customers will realize that there are better places to shop!
But isn't DaVinci Code a Random House title? How did that get tangled up with this?
January 31st, 2010 at 3:30 am
Anon…thanks for the catch! It is a RH title! St. Martins published old Dan Brown…and I just made a dumb assumption. Fixed!
I know…I'm totally astounded by the range of authors affected by this!
January 31st, 2010 at 7:59 am
Thank you Sarah — you are so smart and funny about publishing!
January 31st, 2010 at 11:17 am
Amazon vs. Macmillan
Macmillan wants to set prices between $5.99 and $14.99, with prices in the higher end of that range ($12.99-$14.99) reserved for e-book versions of newly released hardcovers.
Amazon sells all ebooks at $9.99
I think that sounds perfectly fair. The hardcover will go for anywhere between $15-$25. You are paying less because it didn't have to be printed, but you still have to pay for the author's fees, the editing, the publicity, the shipment of ARCs, etc etc all involved in producing the book. Just because there weren't printing costs involved doesn't mean it was free to produce that book. When a book is avalible as a standard paperback for $5.99 Amazon still wants you to pay $9.99 for the ebook.
Check out the post directly from Macmillan
http://www.publishersmarketplace.com/lunch/macmillan_30jan10.html
January 31st, 2010 at 12:13 pm
Anonymous, very well said. $15 is still a pretty big discount over the hardover, and the publisher still needs to make back the money spent on things other than printing.
January 31st, 2010 at 2:53 pm
Anon 6:17AM, Some great points. I will say, though, that I do have a Kindle…and most of the books I buy for it (Romance novels, for example) are WAY less that 9.99. In fact, I have a St. Martin's romance on there right now that was $4.99.
Again, I don't know what the solution is…but I do know that there is some misrepresentation of the facts on both sides.
Thanks for the comment!
January 31st, 2010 at 4:20 pm
Thank you for boosting this signal on this! I know most of the dust will have settled by Monday (which, no doubt, was Amazon's reasoning behind pulling their power play on a Friday afternoon) but the more people know what happened, the better!