Are Direct Sales Part of Reality?

Marty Asks:

Why would anyone ever buy books directly from the publisher?… Do you think that book publishers can expect to see significant, ongoing growth in direct sales through their web sites? Does it matter?

To answer the first part: Right now, there is no compelling reason. As discussed, the stellar growth of Amazon clearly indicates that readers are just as comfortable clicking books into virtual shopping carts as they are pulling books off of actual shelves. Nobody’s bummed on buying books online, but what are the odds of publishers becoming viable competitors with Amazon?

In class, Marty mentioned that a publisher doing 5% of their business through direct sales (as in, purchased through the company’s website),would call its direct sales healthy; robust even. And as we’ve gone over, again and again, readers (even publishing students) don’t care about publishers. We look for new reads based on content, reviews, bestseller lists, recommendations, and only very rarely imprints.  

Take Ooligan, for example.  Let’s say that a reader for Deer Drink the Moon stumbles upon our website.  She likes what she sees on the homepage, so she clicks through to the booklist.  She finds a psychological thrillers, some historical fiction, some Croation translations, and the autobiography of a politician.  In other words, barring a fantastic coincidence, she’ll find nothing she wants.  

Now let’s say she goes to Amazon.  After she types in the title and reads the customer reviews (well, in this case, review — we’ve gotta get on that), she’ll be prompted to check out a book of poetry by Mary Oliver; Swordbird, a similarly-genre’d read for 4-6 graders; and a John Steinback novel, Cannery Row.  What the Steinback has to do with anything, I’m not sure, but these results are still a lot more likely to interest our reader.  

And, of course, the book is at Ooligan’s site for $19.95 and Amazon’s for $14.99 (or $8.88, used).  But let’s not dwell on that.

My point is that unless publishers publish in very specific niches, and a reader can expect a specific kind of product from them every time (like Harlequin, for example), there’s no reason for a reader to even visit their website, much less purchase from them. The McSweeney’s of the world should keep on focusing on readers, and, if bookstores disappear entirely, expect rising direct sales.  Ooligan, unless we reform our list, probably should do neither.

It Wouldn’t Fit In Here

Before I got “into” book publishing, I thought of Amazon.com as a pretty righteous company:  cheap, limitless, and somehow able to project a radical, free-market vibe despite its obvious corporate bulk.  I wrote my undergrad thesis on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire theory, which is kind of neo-marxism (if that even means anything to you\at all) and is very excited about the internet because Hardt and Negri wrote in the late 90′s, during the Pre-Jaded Era.  Anyway.  They loved the internet because it represented centralized information accessible to all, and, moved by that same spirit, I felt pretty Okay or even Good about Amazon.  Of course, the truth is that I was going to start using it no matter how I felt because it’s convenient, and I’m lazy.

Lately though, I’ve come to learn that Amazon is a lot more than one-stop shopping for my out-of-print textbooks and Pilates workout videos.  First of all, it’s cheap because Amazon screws over publishers (and authors), and there’s nothing new or innovative about that.  It is truly limitless, unconfined by spatial or geographical boundaries, which is the wave of the future, and, I’ll admit, pretty awesome.  But they aren’t radical.  They’re just Big Business, doing what Big Business does best:  Monopolizing the market, and then doing whatever the heck they want.

My Online Marketing professor, Marty Brown, posed the following question:

With its POD/distribution company (BookSurge) and its proprietary e-book platform (Kindle), Amazon looks less and less like an ordinary bookstore, and more and more like a publisher and distributor. Does this bode well or ill for readers, authors, and publishers?

This is, of course, a really good question. 

My first impulse is that this is a bad thing.  It’s going to run publishers out of house and home, destroy the industry, close the cute independent bookstores (if there are any still open), and convert books into GigaPets, or whatever. 

But the whole thing about the internet is that nobody owns it, and I would guess that, as we speak, some cybergenius is figuring out how to subvert the whole system.  Also, not to be a drag, but the publishing industry has been treading water ever since it started trying to make money instead of enrich and distribute works of art.  If anybody killed The Book, it was the blockbuster. 

In short, it’s high time for a restructuring of the whole system, and I’d be fine if all of us “publishing” students became freelance editors or literary agents, and left the ordering and stocking up to Amazon.  Not to excuse their evil ways, but if us bookish types were allowed to do our thing without stressing out over pricetags, it could be a boon to readers and authors alike.  My guess is that, in the future, sites like Amazon will be used as filters for the incredible excess of titles available to readers, and that other, more specialized filters will emerge.  Independent book review sites will be the new independent book stores, as well as the new “publishers.” 

Or, Amazon will just eat the entire world and we’ll have nothing to read but the Twilight Series.  Whichever.