you might want to credit the Slate[edit:Vulture] article this post is based on and quotes directly from, and its author, Phoebe Reilly:
Iād be a bit wary about accepting Englerās claims on financial issues at face value. There seems to be some evidence that sheās stiffing Elloraās Caveās authors on royalty payments and this claim that Amazonās hurting her imprintās sales might be another way to justify her previous actions.
Wow, people still pay for their porn? Weird.
Lady wank is HUGE business!
So to summarize: self-publisher turns into publisher for other authors, and then complains when another publisher gives the other authors a better deal.
Dude, have you been living under a rock? The Fifty Shades of Grey movie is making millions. It broke a bunch of box office records. There are entire subgenres (probably NSFW, definitely ridiculous) of self-published erotica on Amazon.
Are these affiliate links? Does this make @frauenfelder a pornographer?
Soā¦ āThe Empressā New Clothesā sounds like āClan of the Cave Bear of Gorā
Crocodile tears for her!
Sounds like sheās being taken down by newer, smaller authors with new access to publishing (through amazon). Thatās a good thing.
Her fault for not paying off legislators to write new regulations to keep out newcomers. 140 hour training courses for Porn Technicians. Thatās just business sense!
Right? If sheās netted $10mil a year for over a decade, how much more money does she need??
Amazon has a very ambivalent relationship to the sellers because they promote free videos and free ebooks over regular products, so Amazon is missing its 12% or 15% cut that it gets from people actually selling.
If Amazon was making like $50,000 a month off sales of her books, was she getting $50,000 a month worth of service? On the IT side, Amazon is providing a static web page for the product, and thatās not worth fifty large. Was she getting $50,000 a month in marketing from Amazon? That would be a hell of a lot of marketing!
No, Amazon is taking that money and developing things like the Fire phone or trying to become NetFlix or something. They donāt even know what they want to do, but they are using the online sales as a cash cow so they can reinvent themselves. But if they want that money, they should be more focused on helping sellers sell. They are so focused on the next part of their journey of self-discovery that they are neglecting their core business.
Mod note: Stay on topic.
Cue the worldās smallest violinā¦
I dunno. Amazon, by nature of being Amazon (ie, the biggest online bookstore in the world, with the most traffic), is providing her with the traffic to generate those sales. Itās hard to say whether or not she would have made the same number of sales from selling the books directly on her own site, but I doubt it.
Always has been, right? Just dressed up in paperbacks, and marked with a secret sigil for those in the know?
(to say nothing of the āsecret sigilā of beefcake on the coverā¦)
Actually, it seems she is complaining that there are similar books by authors she does not publish that are undercutting hers and that their search engine is biasing people away from her works.
The first complaint seems to be that she simply canāt compete in a saturated market.
The second one though, well, it is a little weird that when you search for āJaid Blackā on Amazon, you donāt get anything by her until the fourth result and the first three are free books. I looked and couldnāt find the word āJaidā anywhere on the first result, Close Liasons - even in the comments.
That does seem like a rather questionable business practice.
Iāve noticed that Amazonās recommender seems to be biasing pretty heavily towards self-published books over the last year, but that could at least be explained by the fact that more people are reading them. The search results? Looks like outright tampering to me.
That cover art! She has no nipples! He has nipples, but theyāre alien ones!
Try selling something through a retail chain and see how much the publisher gets.
