It may not be long until new innitiatives such as Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing Program, Amazon’s Studios and Google’s Music Artist Hub shorten the authors-publishers-retailers chain, quietly displacing traditional Media intermediaries.
Amazon announced at the begining of November 2010 that John Locke had become the first author without a major publisher to sell more than 1m books over the Kindle. The company also acquired rights to 35 titles by Ed McBain, a crime writer.
Shortly after, Amazon has recently anounced the acquisition of 450 children’s titles from Marshall Cavendish, a subsidiary company of Times Publishing Group, the printing and publishing subsidiary of Singapore-based conglomerate Fraser and Neave, and at present a publisher of books, directories and books. In this way, Jeff Bezo’s company now adds children books to its publishing program, which currently includes science fiction books, thrillers, romance novels, new authors books, foreign translations and short stories.
Add to this that Amazon recently claimed that they have been selling more than 1mn Kindles devices in a week, and this is a very impressive sell channel for book authors to circumvent the power of their traditional editorials and publishers.
Will this stop here? Amazon is a all-content Internet retailer. The company couldn’t leave out the Movies business, and it has decided to go into the movie business by creating Amazon Studios. This allows for Amazon to develop films, and for e.g. Warner Bros. to produce those. How Amazon develops films, it is basically by launching a screenwriting and filmmaking contest among individuals willing to cede owner rights to the Internet company. And any filmmaker who likes a script posted in amazon.com can use it to make what they call a “Test Film”, and publish it through the company portal as a screenplay.
So far for the Book and the Movie industries. And yes, Google has recently launched its Music Artist Hub, an initiative that allowed Google to team up with a selection of major artists to offer previously unreleased concert albums and remixes, supporting unsigned and independent musicians. As Andy Rubin, SVP of Mobile at Google, puts it:
“With the Google Music artist hub, any artist who has all the necessary rights can distribute his or her own music on our platform, and use the artist hub interface to build an artist page, upload original tracks, set prices and sell content directly to fans — essentially becoming the manager of their own far-reaching music store. This goes for new artists as well as established independent artists.”
Whether all these projects will pay off, it remains to be seen. But the trend is there, the traditional publishing, editorial and discographic industries are being replaced by another type of intermediary, but one that is ready to adjust their selling prices to the market demand.
Yes, it’s true, some authors are even trying to circumvent Amazon itself as a publisher, selling directly to consumers. J.K. Rowling for instance recently announced her Pottermore project. Also, the UK-based literary agent Andrew Wylie last year briefly alarmed publishers by establishing an imprint to sell electronic versions of books by clients including John Updike. And big-name music bands such as Radiohead have been able to sell directly to consumers, making the later ones chose the price that they were willing to pay.
The success of those individual projects has apparently been megre so far. These projects hugely depend on the authors’ mass market reaches, and seem therefore not to be made for niche writers. But that dependency on the existing mass market reach doesn’t apply to Amazon, because it already has it, doing the job for those niche authors.
Indeed, as in the case of Amazon KDP, Amazon Studios seems to be more oriented towards niche authors / screenwriters. The business model that Amazon Studios allows — ceding content rights for 18 months — makes more known creators to chose publishing through Amazon when they have already tested first their success through the more traditional approach. But that does not seem the point. Entering a market by addressing a low profit or even unprofitable niche market, and disrupting the industriies’ incumbent later, is something that has proved to be quite successful in the past. Amazon and Google have been able to launch their respective programs because the later are subsidized by the companies´main businesses. Indeed, Google Music Hub is oriented towards a very small niche market, miles away from the company main business in advertising. And the amazon.com revenue is roughly twice as much as the most successful movie studio, and even then, a good portion of those revenues that the studio generates goes to the movie studios like Warner that produced those films.
Key to the still-to-be-seen, but promising, success of authors away from the traditional publishing industries is the use that Amazon and Google could make out of their social capabilities. Amazon is trying to make reading a more social activity, through their recently launched Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, a program that allows for Amazon Prime members to share ebooks on the Kindle.. W.r.t. its publishing initiative, Jeff Bezo’s company is making its publishing project a collaborative one, where filmmakers and screenwriters can work together developing projects to their full potential. And more evidently than in the case of Amazon, Google is making the channels it owns like Youtube and Google+ part of the Artist Ub initiative, by allowing authors to publicize their music.
At the end, these projects seem currently limited in their business models and rewards, but it is interesting because it may not be long until Amazon and Google can loose their need of the traditional book publishers, movie studios and music agents, displacing the traditional industries.
Regards,
Carlos.
