Fitting the Puzzle Pieces Together: Amazon and Our Future

In case you missed it last weekend, many gay-themed books, including Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain, went missing from Amazon's ranking system. Depending on who you listen to, it was either a poorly conceived attempt to control adult content, a cataloging error, or a hack intent on showing how inappropriate content functions can lead to problems.

Either way, a lot of content that was there one day, was gone the next. And Twitter (specifically, the hashtag #amazonfail) became the rallying point for the reaction. Amazon relented or changed its inappropriate content rules or did something, because the content is back there.

And as if that weren't enough, Amazon's ebook reader, Kindle, has a propreitary format. If you want your book on a Kindle, you have to go through Amazon one way or the other. And if Kindle becomes the bookreader, suddenly a glitch or hack could essentially kill a book's sales.

All of this assumes we're going to e-publishing. You can count on the answer eventually being yes. The economics of publishing are forcing it that way. Publishers are now hungrier than ever for home runs: books they know will sell. The current economic model makes chance-taking on unknowns far too risky.

So if I produce real quality work, and I can't get a foothold with a major publisher, why not make it a PDF and sell it online. All I need is a mention on a few influential blogs (Murderati and The Kill Zone come to mind, but there are others), a little search engine optimization, and maybe an effective Facebook and Twitter campaign, and I might have a hit anyway.

But even then, how do I get paid? I could charge people for the book, maybe after giving them the first 35 pages. (I'd need some sort of protection from someone sticking it on a server someplace for all to download.) Maybe I blog it and get ad revenue based on clickthroughs.

No one knows the answers yet, but next time you go to Borders or Barnes and Noble, pay attention to the floor space dedicated to books. It's shrinking. They don't know what the answer will be, but they have a pretty good idea what it won't be.