Writers Tricks of the Trade Issue 3 Volume 9 | Page 34

system got clogged, returns rose, and it be-
came inefficient, unwieldly, and expensive.
And those publishers wanted to be sold in
bookstores as well. These effects would not
appear to apply to today’s circumstances,
so it would seem that the cheap-ebooks
market and the commercial market will
remain separate for the foreseeable future.
4. P UBLISHERS
WILL PROGRESSIVELY SHED
public. All publishers are alert to the idea
that they have to watch the wider world to
see if any of their backlist titles are surfac-
ing and then use their own capabilities to
see if they can convert interest and aware-
ness into sales. The net result of harder
new title sales and greater backlist oppor-
tunities will shift the balance of sales for
publishers with big backlists.
OVERHEADS FOR SERVICE PROVIDERS . 6. A MAZON P UBLISHING
As the commercial publishing business
shrinks because of reduced shelf space and
increased competition from publishers en-
abled by the new circumstances, the big
publishers will find it increasingly difficult
to support their overheads. To date, they
have mostly addressed that challenge by
adding other publishers as sales and distri-
bution clients. That is not an infinitely ap-
plicable strategy. The next step would be to
start getting rid of costs: sales forces and
warehouses being quite replaceable these
days by Ingram or another big publisher.
We’ll see the number of sales forces calling
on bookstores and the number of ware-
houses shipping to them decline progres-
sively in the next few years. MAKE INROADS SIGNING BIG AUTHORS ; ONLY A
5. B IG PUBLISHERS WILL SEE AN EVER - GROWING
SHARE OF THEIR OWN SALES FROM THEIR BACK-
LIST .
While it is getting increasingly difficult
for publishers to successfully launch new
books, there are new opportunities appear-
ing on the radar every day for titles on the
backlist. This is true both because digital
information sources find and publicize
books regardless of their age and because
publishers don’t need to position inventory
in stores to make them accessible to the
F ALL 2019
WILL CONTINUE TO
RULING FROM COURTS COULD EVENTUALLY STOP
THEM .
When Amazon launched their book pub-
lishing program ten years ago, they proba-
bly had about half the market share they
have now. Big authors want to reach the
whole public, and when indie and chain
bookstores combined to effectively boycott
Amazon titles, it meant large parts of the
consumer base were hard for them to
reach. Now their share of the by-the-book
purchase market has grown, and on top of
that they can play in the Amazon book sub-
scription world painlessly. They could al-
ways pay more for each dollar of sales than
a publisher that didn’t own its own retail-
ing network; now they fail to reach very
few consumers, even if the remaining
stores want to boycott big titles to slow
them down. From here it looks like Amazon
exploits an unfair advantage, being the big-
gest retailer competing with their suppliers
for customers that Amazon owns. But for
that to matter, it has to be a court’s opinion,
not just mine. Perhaps as the effect of the
current market circumstances on competi-
tion become clearer, a court will see it that
way.
P AGE 30
W RITERS ’ T RICKS OF THE T RADE