SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: Delighted to introduce Edgar-nominated and Macavity-winning novelist Daniel Friedman (DON'T EVER GET OLD, DON'T EVER LOOK BACK), who's here talking about Amazon, Jeff Bezos, Amazon v. Hachette, and the odds of getting an agent at a -fest or -con.
Take it away, Daniel!
DANIEL FRIEDMAN: When Susan asked me a few weeks ago to write a blog post about the feud between Amazon and Hachette, I was surprised, because I thought for sure that the issue would be resolved before this was posted. I was wrong. But a lot has already been written about Amazon and Hachette, so I just want to say this:
Take it away, Daniel!
DANIEL FRIEDMAN: When Susan asked me a few weeks ago to write a blog post about the feud between Amazon and Hachette, I was surprised, because I thought for sure that the issue would be resolved before this was posted. I was wrong. But a lot has already been written about Amazon and Hachette, so I just want to say this:
People who love books tend to love bookstores. We love the idea of there being places full of books, staffed by people who love books and like to talk about books. When you’re an author, you travel around and you meet booksellers, and their passion for literature is inspiring. And, if you’re a book person, when you walk into a bookstore, you’re home.
I’m just not sure how much that’s going to matter in the long run, and here’s why: If you want to buy a hardcover adult novel that’s not a New York Times Bestseller, most bookstores are going to be selling it for the full retail price of about $25. Amazon will be selling the hardcover for between $15 and $18, and the e-book for $10-12.
One thing everyone who works in publishing knows is that Jeff Bezos doesn’t care about books. He famously decided to become a bookseller not because he loved books or literature, but because he identified books as a product that people would buy online.
Books are relatively inexpensive, so buying them online doesn’t carry a lot of risk. You can obtain all the information you need to know to make a purchasing decision for a book without holding or examining the object. Books are not like an electronic device that people want to handle and play with and compare to other products before buying. Books are not like clothes that you need to try on before purchasing.
In other words, Bezos decided to sell books because he saw bookstores as a particularly vulnerable retail category; stores we didn’t really need. And as horrifying as that is to people who love bookstores, the success of Amazon over the last 20 years, and the collapse of once-beloved music and video stores seem to suggest that the market is moving towards e-books.
Printing and binding and warehousing and shipping and shelving books in a commercial space with air-conditioning and a staff of people who need to buy food and shelter costs a lot of money. Amazon eliminates all these costs, and efficiency and lower prices tend to win out in the end.
The good news for bookstores is that the shift is going to be slow. In 2010, Borders had over 500 superstores in the United States, and by the end of 2011, it had zero. That massive, rapid contraction in bookstore retail space made a lot of room for remaining booksellers to coexist with Amazon for a while. And a lot of readers are still resistant to reading on screens, even if they spend $500 more on print books every year than they’d spend buying the same books on Kindle.
For authors and publishers, things are moving a little faster. If you’re a writer whose books are published in hardcover, but don’t get prominent bookstore placement and discounts, and aren’t stocked in discount stores like Target and Costco, e-books are going to be a much larger percentage of your sales than they represent for trade publishing overall. And if you’re going to break out, you’re going to have to break out on Amazon. That means that going forward, as bookstore presence matters less and less, the publishers that are going to do best for their authors are the publishers that are most adept at selling e-books. That means better data, smarter marketing that directly targets readers most likely to be interested in a particular book, and pricing strategies designed to maximize visibility in Amazon’s rankings.
Hostility to Amazon is counterproductive, unless publishers can find an alternate venue to sell e-books, and ignorance of how Amazon works is detrimental for authors and inexcusable for publishing professionals. The goal of every publisher’s marketing department should be to know the ins and outs of Amazon better than Hugh Howey.
That doesn’t speak to what’s going on with Hachette right now. Nobody outside of Amazon and Hachette seems to know exactly what Amazon is demanding, and it’s very likely unreasonable. I don’t think Hachette should capitulate, and it will likely be better for most authors if Amazon is the entity that ends up backing down. But authors need to view Amazon as an opportunity, and publishers need to be thinking about how their strategies need to change in a changing marketplace.
One other thing: The CraftFest and AgentFest portions of the ThrillerFest conference just wrapped up. I think conferences are a great way to meet other writers, and there’s a lot to be learned from the panels and craft discussions.
However, aspiring authors should not feel they need to attend a conference to pitch agents. I think a lot of authors believe pitch-sessions at conferences are a way to skip the query-letter stage of the submissions process and get a bunch of full-manuscript requests.
This isn’t really true; although an agent may tell you to send your manuscript because they are hesitant to reject you to your face, manuscript requests from conferences are less likely to lead to offers of representation than manuscript requests from queries for precisely this reason.
And if your query letter and first few pages aren’t generating manuscript requests, it’s likely that there’s some problem with your concept or your prose that will be just as evident to agents who look at your requested manuscript after a conference.
While many authors do meet their agents at conferences, I found my agent by submitting an unsolicited query letter, and I know a lot of other writers who did as well. I don’t think any aspiring writer should feel they have to spend money to submit to agents, and I don’t think anyone should believe that there are shortcuts in the process.
SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: Thank you so much, Daniel. You'v given us a perspective that (correct me if I'm wrong) hasn't come up in the Amazon v. Hachette debates.
Reds and lovely readers, what are your thoughts on Amazon? E-books? Hachette? And what do you think about Daniel's thoughts about agents at the various -fests and -cons?
Daniel Friedman is a graduate of the University of Maryland and NYU School of Law. He lives in New York City. His first novel, DON'T EVER GET OLD wasnominated for the Edgar, Thriller, Anthony and Macavity awards, and was optioned for film by the producers of the "Sherlock Holmes" movies. His second book, DON'T EVER LOOK BACK, was released in 2014.
