Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal
SEATTLE — Amazon.com has taught readers that they do not need bookstores. Now it is encouraging writers to cast aside their publishers. — Amazon will publish 122 books this fall in an array of genres, in both physical and e-book form.
Context & Ripple Effects
The move completes an arc Amazon has been building for years. In 2008, small publishers were already feeling the leverage of Amazon's 'Buy' button, which let the retailer dictate terms to suppliers dependent on its shelf. By August 2011 it was cracking down on some e-book 'publishers', tightening who qualified as a legitimate intermediary at all.
Now Amazon is removing the intermediary entirely: signing authors directly and publishing 122 books this fall across genres, in both physical and e-book form. The significance is structural — the company that taught readers to skip bookstores is now asking writers to skip publishers, while still controlling the dominant e-reader platform through which most of those books would be sold.
First-order effects
- Authors who sign with Amazon Publishing bypass the traditional advance-and-royalty structure and deal directly with the retailer, giving Amazon exclusive content for Kindle and print without paying a publisher's margin.
- Traditional publishers lose negotiating leverage on two fronts at once: their largest retail channel is now also a competing publisher, and their authors have a visible alternative route to market.
Second-order effects
- Publishers must now price and contract against a rival that owns the storefront, the device, and the customer data — any author negotiation becomes a comparison against Amazon's direct offer.
- Literary agents and smaller houses face pressure to reposition as curators and marketers rather than gatekeepers, since distribution — historically their core value — is the thing Amazon supplies by default.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, book publishing follows the path Amazon already cut through retail: vertical integration of platform and content, where the marketplace operator competes with its own suppliers and sets the terms both sides accept.
- The precedent points toward a bifurcated industry — a consolidated big-five tier and a long tail of self- and platform-published authors — with regulators and industry groups eventually forced to ask whether a dominant retailer should also be a publisher.
The trend: Book publishing is entering a disintermediation phase in which the dominant retailer converts its distribution power into a publishing business, compressing the traditional publisher's role between author and platform.