Publishing
Recently Amazon has launched its fourth imprint(which is a trade name), Montlake Romance, to compete in the romance-publishing sector. It’s Amazon’s first foray into genre-specific publishing, and could be the greatest.
Amazon's other three imprints makes traditional publishers worry. Amazon launched its AmazonEncore imprint in May 2009. The press release described it as a new program whereby Amazon will use information such as customer reviews on Amazon.com to identify exceptional, overlooked books and authors with more potential than their sales may indicate. Amazon will then partner with the authors to re-introduce their books to readers through marketing support and distribution into multiple channels and formats, such as the Amazon.com Books Store, Amazon Kindle Store, Audible.com, and national and independent bookstores via third-party wholesalers.”
The AmazonCrossing was invented on May 18th 2010, and translated foreign titles into English. It used the same marketing approach as the Encore print.
Last December, Amazon made the Domino Project, which published a series of manifestos. Amazon also sells rights to some titles to Traditional Publishing houses. It recently sold rights to 10 titles from the Encore and Crossing imprints to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
What does this mean?
Well publishing was left to the professionals. Before an author had to look for a good publisher and this could often be a great hassle. Now thanks to Amazon and the kindle store anyone can write a book and get it published by themselves. Amanda hocking who is 26 years old has 9 self published books in her name and makes a lot of money from her book sales. There is no publisher out there which could offer Amanda better terms than the kindle store right now. Web fiction authors are releasing their works on the ebook store. So what does this mean for the future? Well more and more web fictional writers will move their work onto the ebook store. Some will be taken off the web. This is obviously going to change the community. Anyone can now be an author and publish their books with the kindle ebook store. So publishers have to buck up their ideas if their industry is going to stay or otherwise it will end up like the music industry after iTunes.
