{"id":9421,"date":"2022-01-06T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-01-06T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=9421"},"modified":"2022-02-16T08:12:20","modified_gmt":"2022-02-16T13:12:20","slug":"between-author-and-reader-amazon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=9421","title":{"rendered":"Between Author and Reader: Amazon"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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A recent New Yorker<\/em> article by Parul Sehgal<\/a> that asks \u201cIs Amazon is changing the novel?\u201d sure sounds like a must-read for authors. There\u2019s some history in there and some juicy stuff about the company some writers call \u201cThe Great Satan.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The struggle writers face in meeting the demands of the book marketplace (versus readers) is not a new phenomenon. Sehgal cites an 1891 novel, New Grub Street<\/em>, as an example of \u201cpitiless portraits of the writing life.\u201d A character in that book asserts that \u201cliterature nowadays is a trade,\u201d and how many versions of that have you heard in recent years? The term potboiler was coined to reflect books created without regard to craft, but just to keep the stew pots boiling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A hundred thirty years ago, the Amazon of book distribution was Mudie\u2019s Select Library. Mudie\u2019s market power–along with publishers\u2019 financial incentives\u2014demanded hefty three-volume works, much as publishers today like series books and for much the same reason. One popular book in a series sells the others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But nine-hundred pages (roughly) were a lot to fill, then or now, and writing styles and habits developed to support that requirement. Victorian writers larded in subplots, created large casts of characters, and wrote desperate cliffhangers to carry readers (and themselves) through that long slog. Toward the end of the 19th<\/sup> century, new publishing forms began to take hold, notably less expensive books printed on cheap pulp paper, which opened book purchasing to new markets. As night follows day, new forms of reader enticement emerged, including the development of popular genre fiction\u2014crime novels, Westerns, and the like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, Amazon controls almost three-fourths of U.S. online book sales to adults and almost half of all new-book sales. In that river of print are the company\u2019s own book imprints\u201416 of them. Do authors write a different kind of book when they know readers have power over not only their own book purchases, but can influence others, as well? Not one-on-one, either. Success or failure is right there on screen, thanks to reader-posted stars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kindle Direct Publishing takes reader feedback even farther, right to authors\u2019 wallets. KDP writers are paid based on the number of pages read\u2014increasing the financial incentives for producing lots of pages, new books every three months, and littering them with cliffhangers to keep readers hooked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whether all this has an impact on book quality, I\u2019ll leave to you. In my opinion, it helps account for the increasing violence in crime novels, and the bizarre and gruesome nature these crimes. The frequency of plots with \u201cgirls\u201d (usually not <\/em>a child<\/a>) and children as victims is simply used to raise the stakes. Do you see other evidence of Amazon’s effects? on you? on other writers? on readers?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A recent New Yorker article by Parul Sehgal that asks \u201cIs Amazon is changing the novel?\u201d sure sounds like a must-read for authors. There\u2019s some history in there and some juicy stuff about the company some writers call \u201cThe Great … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Is Amazon changing the way authors write? \n","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[62,122,174,68,104,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-authors","category-book","category-first-draft-blog","category-publishing","category-the-morgue","category-writing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2rX","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9421"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9421\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9424,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9421\/revisions\/9424"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}