This morning, my latest piece at Digital Book World, Booksellers v. Libraries? Publishers v. Amazon? These are the wrong battles to fight, was a quick-pick-up on the first page of Prismatic’s Book Trade section.
Very cool.
Smart authors shouldn’t cut Amazon out
Smart authors shouldn’t cut Amazon out, contrary to VentureBeat’s urging. Smart authors shouldn’t cut Barnes & Noble or anyone else out, either.
In an age of electronic distribution, there are no bad points of purchase. As long as the quality of the purchase and consumption experiences meet your personal standards, go!
Smart authors will not only leverage each distribution channel and play to its strengths - they will, at the same time, aggressively establish their own direct to reader presence. This is a critical way to ultimately maintain (gain?) control of their own destiny.
For now, Amazon’s reach is too big and the cost of re-creating its influence is too high to walk away from.
However, just because a point of distribution meets author’s purchase and consumption experience standards today, doesn’t mean they will in the future. This is where a direct-to-reader presence comes in - the author’s hedge against unknown changes in distribution channel policies and practices.
If Amazon is the totality of an author’s distribution strategy, there are definitely going to be problems in the long run. Not only will the ability to establish the direct reader relationships suffer, but there will not be a single place where the author can be in 100% control of their brand and message.
When Amazon is an important part of a complete distribution strategy, not the complete distribution strategy, the foundation for success has been intelligently laid.
Amazon has very aggressively been redesigning their entire approach to book marketing and discovery. It shows in spaded with the latest email formats.
The Amazon emails are clean, clear, concise and it’s very easy to quickly scan and make a single call to action decision.
It would be beneficial to know how well these perform for Amazon … but that’s unlikely to be disclosed.
Regardless, authors, publishers and retailers would be wise to take note of the design and execution quality of an email marketing piece from the biggest player in the market.
A DRM Strategy Isn’t Enough
Today, Joseph Esposito (@josephjesposito) has a really well thought-out piece on The Scholarly Kitchen titled, Thinking Through a Strategy for Digital Rights Management.
It really is excellent and worth reading if you care at all about this issue.
However, there are really a number of issues in this ongoing (and accelerating) debate that need to be separated in order to be made “whole” again.
The first is competing against Amazon, Apple and others in the eBook arena. The way to compete against these companies isn’t by removing DRM. Rather, it’s by building the best possible discovery and reading experiences on the planet. Once these are in place, true competition can begin.
I realize this is a tall order - but competing against super successful, multi-billion-dollar organizations is never easy.
Retailers, publishers and authors need to start on the fringe and work their way towards the middle, taking one small step at a time - with each subsequent step being built on the rock sold foundation of doing everything humanly possible to support the reader.
The second is the presence of DRM. Whether DRM exists or not is actually irrelevant. The size of the file sharing sites that enable distribution of “cracked” files is meaningless because these services are extremely cumbersome for consumers to use. Repeated research has shown that consumers will GLADLY pay when the process is frictionless.
Consequently, with or without DRM, if the process of finding, buying and reading ebooks isn’t magic - there isn’t a business to be had competing against Amazon and Apple. These organizations will tirelessly invest money, time and people to deliver magic … so the bar has been set.
The real question is, can you exceed it?
Last week Amazon delivered a major introduction to their Kindle free content lineup. In partnering with The Kenyon Review, Amazon is now offering all Kindle owners a free digest subscription to one of the most well respected literary journals on the planet.
While the selection of The Kenyon Review may not seem overly critical to the non-literary set, there are two really key points to highlight from this announcement:
- Amazon introduced a new way to trial subscriptions. Instead of paying upfront for The Kenyon Review, Kindle owners now have an opportunity to receive the digest, evaluate its content, and make a more informed decision about a subscription; and
- Amazon remains as committed to serving the serious reader as ever, even as apps, movies and TV programming via Amazon Prime continue to grab headlines.
Did Amazon have to add more free content to the Kindle ecosystem to remain competitive? Of course not.
Did Amazon need to introduce a new way to evaluate subscriptions before you purchase them? Again, of course not.
Amazon continues to add to the Kindle ecosystem because, with each addition, your Kindle becomes just a bit harder to let go.
When you’re innovating this aggressively ahead of your competitors, it’s next to impossible for them to catch up. Equally important, it’s even harder for new entrants to jump into the market.
