Deborah Cooke: Author

Ah, the internet. You knew we had to get to it sooner or later!

We’ll look at what the internet did to book distribution first, then we’ll need to look at the impact of this upon authors (since we are, after all, authors, and that’s our perspective.)

Amazon.com was the huge change to bookselling and book distribution, fueled by the internet. Suddenly, anyone could buy books online, from any place, at any time, and have them shipped. Amazon had a fantastic catalogue right from the outset – I knew people who used Amazon as a reference and a resource for information as well as a source for books. In the early days, many authors did not have individual websites – the easiest way to find out the titles of an author’s entire backlist was to check on Amazon. You could even order them right there. Presto. There is something wonderful about instant gratification.

One of the early challenges faced by Amazon was how to be competitive in terms of pricing. Not only was there the price of the book to be paid, but the book had to be shipped. If the customer paid the full retail price and the shipping, he or she might find it more convenient to simply stop at a local bricks and mortar store to buy the book. At that time, the big bookstore chains were offering discount cards to regular customers – buy ten paperbacks, get one free, that kind of thing – so the customer might even save money by going to a real bookstore.

Amazon pursued deep discounting from publishers. Essentially, they wanted the same pricing as distributors – I believe that in many cases, they even negotiated lower price points. This gave them the flexibility to discount books to the consumer. There was a great deal of ruckus in the industry about this, and ultimately, the big chains all negotiated the same kind of quantity pricing and discounting. This is why books are always on sale everywhere.

The other issue was shipping. Bear in mind that nothing offered “free” to you as a consumer by an online bookseller is truly free. Someone somewhere is paying for it. “Free shipping” is supported by subsidies, frequently from the publishing house. That’s why it’s often linked to specific titles. Programs which offer a discount when you buy two books together are also paid – they are typically paid by one publisher (often the publisher of the title with the lower distribution) but can be paid by anybody. These programs have become a kind of promotion for books, and are budgeted as such.

I met a writer at conference once who had chosen to participate in a better-together program at an online bookseller – as part of her promotion plan, she paired her book with a concurrent release from a NYT bestselling author in the same subgenre. She had to pay the incremental different in sum retail price for the total number of transactions that actually occurred within the specified time period (probably a month). She thought it was great promotion and visibility at a great price – my point is simply that these promotions can be paid by anyone.

Amazon also wanted to drive traffic to their site. Buying books online was new, and they needed to create traffic patterns. One element was the creation of a ranking assigned to each book. I don’t know whether they guessed how completely compulsive authors can be, but maybe they did – there was a precedent for the ranking. In the 1990’s Ingrams had a bestselling book list called the Big Kahuna, which listed the top 50 titles or something that they had shipped the previous day or week from their warehouse. Authors were so compulsive about checking this list hourly or daily that the servers were repeatedly crashed. The list was soon made accessible only to registered customers – if it still exists, it’s not visible to authors anymore. BUT Amazon created a ranking, which is a conglomeration of a number of different variables – including but not limited to sales – and authors began clicking through to check this ranking with rabid enthusiasm. Bingo – lots of traffic.

The other thing Amazon did was create their affiliate program. Authors were creating websites en masse at this point, and it makes sense that their readers and fans would be looking at the author sites. Amazon’s affiliate program required an individual with a website (like an author) to register with the program. The individual then would put “buy it now” links on his or her website, which linked directly to the Amazon page for that book. Amazon tracked the traffic coming through each portal and affiliates received some incremental payment – a percentage of the total order booked and paid on that click-through – for having the link. This was universally perceived to be good, to be acting upon that instant gratification urge we all have, until other booksellers launched their own online websites.

In the face of increasing competition, Amazon continues to try to be the go-to site for buying books. They launched the Kindle e-reader and offer digital versions of books in the Kindle format. They created Author Profile pages, with the option of authors blogging directly on Amazon. They now have migrated these profiles into Author Stores, which list all of an author’s titles, provide a bio and photo, and support an RSS feed from the author’s existing blog (which indicates that I wasn’t the only one to not get around to blogging at Amazon often enough!) They have reader discussion forums, too.

The thing is that the other bookselling chains have created quite similar environments, although none is as extensive as Amazon. Borders, Barnes and Noble, Books-a-Million all offer similar sites, similar programs and similar pricing. There is now also Indiebound, a website for a consolidation of independent booksellers. There is Chapters/Indigo in Canada, and Amazon.ca, as well as Amazon in many other world markets.

I think the most profound impact of all of this is upon bricks and mortar independent booksellers. I’m not sure how they can continue to exist, which makes me quite sad. I have heard indie bookstore owners complain that the big box stores and online stores are selling books to consumers at lower prices that the indie stores can even buy them. Not good. I love indie bookstores, how the stock reflects the taste of the owner/buyer, how quirky and wonderful they can be. But they are not able to buy from publishers with the same kinds of volume discounts – this wouldn’t matter if you had to drive to a big box store to save the money. Online bookselling, however, eliminates the question of proximity – online booksellers are in your family room, 24/7, which is even closer than your local indie bookstore. If you don’t have to pay shipping because it’s subsidized, and you get a better price even as a consumer for each book, and they either have everything or can get it quickly, the only reason for indie bricks and mortar booksellers to continue to exist is the expertise of people who know and love books. Yikes.

Tomorrow, we’ll talk about the implications of changes in book distribution for authors.