Thanks for the info, hscope!
Robert said:
Are the payments called ordinary income that Amazon makes every time you sell a book printed by amazon. Everywhere you look it is presented as a royalty payment.
JamesM said:
My guess would be that they are calling the payments royalties, so that we'll all know what they're talking about. But by the strictest sense of the word, they're not. More like consignment-type payments?
The money that Amazon passes on to the self-pub authors is sales income. It is not royalties from a license agreement because Amazon does not license production rights from the self-pub authors. They are the vendors for the self-pub authors and the contract self-pub authors sign with them is a terms of sale arrangement, a simplified form of the agreements publishers have with booksellers. From the gross revenues of the book sales, Amazon deducts their marketing fees – essentially the formatting they require to sell e-books on their platform, accounting and processing of sales and co-op advertising fees, which they have standardized for the self-pub authors based on book price.
Amazon gives the net amount of the revenues to the author/publisher after their business expenses are deducted as a vendor. The self-pub author then deducts further business expenses the author incurred in production, publicity, etc. as the publisher of the book, not just the author, and the net is the publisher’s (author’s) profit. It’s pretty much the same as what a bookseller does with Random House and other publishers except that there is a production aspect because of Amazon insisting on everyone using its Kindle formatting to sell on their platform – and having self-pub authors pay part of their sales revenue for that formatting. And also instead of Amazon buying copies of a print book on consignment with a returns system, whereupon Amazon would set the sales price, etc., and owns that stock, with e-books Amazon does not buy the books, just processes the sales as the vendor and takes their cut, passing on the net revenue to the publishers, including the self-publishers. There is also Amazon’s subscription service, Kindle Unlimited, which operates on a different system and with exclusivity, but those sales are also not a licensing agreement and are not royalty income but instead sales revenues.
Amazon called the sales revenues to self-publishers royalties – and other e-book vendors doing self-pub offerings followed suit – because then they could essentially lie and say to self-pub authors that they pay bigger royalty rates to self-pub authors than publishers pay to licensing authors by pretending that total sales revenue to publishers, including self-publishers, was the same thing as a royalty payment to a licensing author – and that their costs as formatting vendors were the same as the costs of publishers in producing, marketing, distributing, publicizing, etc. their licensed titles, which was not at all the case but justified high marketing fees deducted from the sales revenues.
It’s essentially false advertising but none of them got pinged for it. At the time, Amazon was negotiating with publishers on the terms of e-book sales and they tried to use the self-pub authors as leverage, as well as refusing to process publishers’ sales. And some of the other e-book vendors like Smashwords were trying to bring in self-pub clients and made a lot of extravagant claims. It’s calmed down now, but we again have path dependence, so they all keep calling them royalties and most self-publishing authors are thus doing their taxes wrong, because the tax agencies treat royalties which are from a license and sales revenue from a publishing business as two different types of income. Legally, a licensing rights contract – that gives particular exclusive rights to the publisher – and a sales vendor contract for e-books that works out the terms of the sales arrangement but involves no production rights in the work itself, are two entirely different types of business contracts. (And unlike a licensing agreement, Amazon can change the terms of its sales contract whenever it wants and has done so frequently.)
Luka said:
That's why the number of books written by the authors should be added to an internet ratings system. Guy writes one book and self-publishes (without professional editing) for a lark it should be slotted into a third-rate amateur fiction section.
You don’t get points for being prolific. It doesn’t make you more of a pro than someone who puts out just one book. Readers don’t care how many books an author puts out in terms of whether they like the stories or not. In fact, a lot of readers don’t like authors who are prolific, mainly because they tend to like only some of the author’s books or series and don’t like the author spending time on other works that they aren’t as interested in. Being prolific can also, since the 1980s, cause some marketing problems for publishers working with an author, especially in hardcover, which is why publishers frequently prefer to put out only one book a year by an author they license with. On the other side, sometimes they put out several books in a series close together as another marketing strategy.
Some of the folk working through Amazon’s subscription plan, KU, have found putting out as much product as possible sometimes helps them maximize fees they get for bulk subscription downloads, almost as if they were a magazine publisher. A lot of self-pub authors have found putting out short fiction along with longer pieces helps keep them in readers’ eyes and Amazon’s algorithms. Of course, Amazon has recently been throwing some prolific authors out of KU, including fairly prominent ones, for violating their terms of KU in how they are trying to maximize their share of the one pot Amazon uses to pay everyone in that service. So that’s a trickier kettle of fish.
But, KatG, what you were saying about how reading fiction comes with no attendant status... I'd have to disagree... I feel immensely proud when I've read a great book and I brag about it's good qualities to everyone I encounter... and quite often the fact that I've read anything at all is impressive to people.
That you read books in general, yes, that will impress some people because a lot of people don’t read recreationally much and so envy people who manage it. But that you read a
particular, specific book doesn’t impress them. That you own and read a Stephen King novel doesn’t get you more status than if you own and read a Margaret Atwood novel (those two are pals.) That you bought it in hardcover instead of cheaper formats doesn’t get you any real status either.
Whereas if you have a handbag from a particular designer, one usually requiring a fair amount of cash, that gives you status because the specific designer has status, is trendy and you are seen as trendy for having the handbag or the jacket or buying the Ferrari car, etc. In contrast, books don’t vary in price much and usually mainly because of length/format – not from elite status, show of wealth or wide demand. If you are the first one to get a hot new specific electronic game and get to play it early, that gives you status – and the game will have a higher price than other games. Even more so with tech like iphones.
If you own, have listened to and are a fan of a particular musical artist, that gives you identity status from who the musical artist is to others, plus you are likely to buy merchandise from that artist like t-shirts that identify you as a fan. These are all sales techniques used with various products to make them status purchases, get people to buy for the status of the product, not just the desire for the product. You can’t really do that with fiction works. Fiction readers don’t care about that aspect of the fiction products. In fact, fiction readers are on average quite miserly and most want books as cheaply as possible.
Talking positively about books you’ve read is word of mouth and is great for the author of the book. But it doesn’t get you much status in society for doing it. However, they have found it sometimes useful to attract attention to and spread name awareness of books by offering giveaways and special prizes to fans and potential readers, which could encourage people to buy and read the books and then talk about them. This is something that authors and self-pub authors have often done in a variety of ways. (And crowdfunding campaign goals with rewards is a version of this.)
How do you explain the biggest selling genre of fiction. "romance," or
Chick lit?
Well first off, romance isn’t the biggest selling genre of fiction. Suspense is and has been for pretty much forever, the big dog of fiction. Romance is the biggest selling category in mass market paperback, though not as much as it used to be. Before the big wholesale market shrinkage, which hit category romance quite hard even though they prepped for it, romance made up about half of the mmpb fiction market. Now it makes up about a third of it, and suspense is the second most popular category in mmpb. (Suspense is basically in nearly everything – romance category, nearly all SFF, all horror, westerns and historicals, etc.)
Chick lit is the derogatory name that unfortunately stuck (partly because the media loved it,) for a loose, non-deliberately created lit movement that developed in general fiction off of several successful titles, (just like grimdark did in fantasy,) with authors doing similar stories with similar styles and themes in the late 1990’s-early oughts. Specifically, Bridget Jones’ Diary, which was the big one, A Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing, Confessions of a Shopaholic and Good in Bed, plus some others. “Chick lit” stories are comedic stories about women juggling issues with careers, relatives, friends and relationships. Like grimdark, chick lit stories weren’t new; there was simply a cluster of authors working in similar territory who were then grouped as a movement/trend in people’s views and given a name. The name then transitioned from lit movement into bookselling sub-category, though the term is used less and less now and nobody likes it.
Chick lit is sort of a sub-category of the bigger field of what was loosely called, again usually derogatorily, as women’s fiction, which was everything sold in general fiction by a woman author with a woman protagonist. The assumption, as it was also with category romance, was that these books were of only interest to women readers, because the authors and protagonists were women, which meant the books had girl cooties and men would avoid them like the plague.
But what we actually know is that “women’s fiction,” including “chick lit,” and romance all have men reading audiences, and not just the mm gay romances. Romance also has a percentage of men authors, working both in general fiction and the category market, though sometimes under a woman-sounding pseudonym. It did drop to a smaller amount in category romance, due to again the big hit from the wholesale collapse, which meant a lot of men authors decamped for what they thought would be more profitable pastures. And the need for romance authors to more directly promote on the Net and out in the field after the wholesale market shrinkage made it harder for men authors because it’s low status for men (being seen as “women’s” books,) and because some romance publishers only want men writing under a pseudonym because of erroneous beliefs.
But the number of men romance authors is now increasing over the last years, as the field broadens out. Men can have better odds with romance in general fiction and the biggest man writing romance is bestseller Nicholas Sparks. Sparks doesn’t always do romances and he doesn’t like any of his novels called romances (because girl cooties,) but nonetheless he is part of the field. Eric Jerome Dickey also has been a bestseller in romantic general fiction, and so forth.
Women make up over seventy percent of the fiction reading audience because they are encouraged to read, and they’ll read anything, from erotica to commando novels. Teenage girls turned manga into a successful import, for instance. But consequently, men readers are more sought after, first because they have a higher status in our unequal society so their interest in something makes it more serious and important. And second, since they don’t read as much fiction and because they are viewed, erroneously, as pickier – specifically that they don’t want much to do with women. (And also sadly perceived erroneously as white men who don’t want much to do with POC.) This is why the British publisher who put out Harry Potter made J.K. Rowling go by her initials, even though it was the 1990s – they assumed that boys and their parents would avoid the book about a boy if they knew the author was a woman, because again girl cooties. So if you want to be trendy, you’d still try to write “for men” and avoid girl cooties.
But we do know those views are limiting, frequently ridiculous (see J.K. Rowling,) and not fair to the readers, and things are slowly changing towards not trying to divide books into “girl” books and “boy” books. Which is good, because the girl cooties concept creates a lot of discrimination for women authors. They don’t get reviewed as often as the men and their books are less likely to get respected and more likely to be dismissed as “commercial” drivel. Women get considered to be writing romance even when they are not, on the grounds that any romantic sub-plot by a woman author is supposedly all important to her, and this is then seen as inferior. Women sometimes get marketed by their publisher as romance when they are not and in SFF they tend to get book covers that are either lacy and fluffy or hyper-sexualized with women in tortuous, anatomically impossible positions – which can drive readers, particularly men readers, away and not particularly fit their stories. Women don’t get on average as much promotion from their publishers as the men authors do, even though many women authors are the big sellers.
And most importantly, women authors are often still directly discouraged from trying to work in various sub-categories on the erroneous grounds that they don’t sell well in it. It used to be expressed that women couldn’t write fantasy because they must be bad at it and also only men read fantasy and wouldn’t read the women authors, etc. That one has been mostly conquered over the years but women are still being discriminated against in science fiction sub-categories such as military SF and hard SF. And women run into a lot of problems trying to do horror fiction. So those issues can affect women authors trying to do publicity for their works because too many people, including booksellers, still erroneously believe women authors are not as widely appealing as men authors. So it’s not a great thing in either direction, though it’s getting better.
I'd guess that most semi-intelligent male writers give a large degree of attention to how the female characters in their stories are representing their gender... so they (the writers) don't come across as boorish or sexist.
Not really. Again, men are more prized as readers and are viewed as not caring about female characters, and women readers are viewed as willing to read widely. Also women readers – and the women who work in fiction publishing -- have been long used to dealing with men writers writing very sexualized portraits of female characters, portraying them as harridans, femme fatales, virginal innocents and all the rest. That doesn’t mean that novels by men don’t get criticized for those issues by some people or that they aren’t discussed in general, (see the Twitter hashtags below,) but overall it’s not something that men authors are particularly sweating.
https://twitter.com/hashtag/menwrit...^tweetembed|twterm^980384044406988800&ref_url
https://twitter.com/hashtag/IfWomen...^tweetembed|twterm^980384044406988800&ref_url
We might want to have another thread on book-selling sub-categories, since people often seem really confused about that, and one on contract terms and financial stuff like royalty rates and returns. I didn’t really think this through.
But put down what things you want and we can do different topics. I am almost caught up on this one and then we can also get into some more examples of what various authors have done publicity wise. If you did something like hscope's tweets, you can also put those up, as you have been doing.
