Make Friends With Amazon

I cannot find a single good thing being said about the Amazon.com move to limit Print On Demand (POD) to their in-house printer. Of course this is an inconvenience to anyone who has a POD book with any other printer, but the fact of the matter is, if you add up every POD book in the world, it i9s nothing compared to the number coming on stream. the big numbers are ahead, and Amazon is doing good while doing well by their new policy. Again, anyone who thinks Amazon is wrong should compete against them.

One of the strangest threads out there is Amazon is out to kill off competitors. I doubt that. My sense is they are out to serve customers. My experience with iUniverse is they were suicidal, so no "killing off" was necessary. Since I once judged iUniverse the best of the POD (probably still are) the rest are even more so suicidal.

I "fired" B&N's Lightening Source because I could do a better job than they did. I went from a buck a book royalty to about $8 a book, plus eight times the volume and making friends with Amazon in the meantime (if nothing else because with B&N & Lightening Source & Ingraham, the book was always "out of stock, available in 6-8 weeks..." on Amazon. If I was Amazon, I would make the moves they did if nothing else to capture those lost sales. I am writing all this up as a case study, too bad it is not ready yet, but maybe in a couple of weeks. It is a wonderful example of creative destructionism.

If there are any lawsuits from this, I'll write a a friend-of-the-court brief telling the judge how wicked exploiters the POD houses are and what a benevolent organization the loving Amazon.com is. Or something like that.

This to-do also supports my contention that artists, and I consider writers artists, are the most conservative group in society. There is no group that fears change more. For all of their bohemian pretensions, they want things set and stable. It may be because the creative process internally is so chaotic, they want the externals stable. Just a thought.

Bookmark this post --- Email this post