Written by tricia linden

Traditional Publishing vs Amazon.

A moment for some observations.

As I hop around the internet and blogsphere, I often see a lot of chatter regarding Amazon vs Traditional Publishing. Not surprisingly, I find many articles and comments about how much Traditional Publishing dislikes, resents, (hates) Amazon, that big old nasty price cutting distributor of all things books and more. But according to my limited observations, and those of many of my writing friends, Amazon is the biggest distributor of books, both Indie and Traditionally Published.

For Amazon to sell books, they need a supply of books to sell. And for Traditionally Published books to be sold, they need a place to sell them. I know, all very obvious observations. But what this means, is these two players NEED each other. Gasp!

It’s sort of like a marriage made in hell with all the blessings of corporate America. Of course, we can guess which one needs (or hates) the other more.  I don’t believe Amazon hates Trad Pub, but I do get the impression that Trad Pub hates strongly dislikes Amazon.

Usually the weaker partner in a relationship ends up resenting their place in that relationship, so I’d go with Trad Pub is the one with more to lose.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not against Trad Pub. I’m in favor of all paths that lead to the mountain top.

Of course, a great big international sales outlet like Amazon needs content (i.e. books) to sell, but if Trad Pub goes away, Amazon still has a line out the door, around the block and down the road of writers with books to sell. It’s kind of hard to imagine writers are going away, and I don’t expect them to stop going to Trad Pub as a valid resource to produce their books, but I do see an uptick of Indie writers producing their own books.

So where is this all going? When I tell people I have written three books, the third one recently released, the question I get most isn’t who published you? The question I get most often is; can I find your books on Amazon? And my answer is YES.

Just saying…..

Enjoy always, T

7 thoughts on “Traditional Publishing vs Amazon.”

  1. I tried Amazon for my cartoon books. There was a self help upload at no cost with 30% royalty(assistance promised) and also a set up package fee of at least $1,500 (basic and more for advanced)and they would do all the work for 20% royalty. But that is for text and images up to 20 free but after that a big charge per image. Imagine the cost of 100 images!But they are set up for text. Sending images was a nightmare. There is a several stage reformat process from image to word and my genius tech could not get it right as every time one glitch was solved another appeared requiring repeated conversations with the self help techs but they continued to bring you only as for wherein you would need their service to pay the start up fees anyway. Of course that is the way for most to go and the start up fees were cheaper than most but I got very disgusted with it. Amazon’s massive marketing ability is another plus. I have material now for three 100 cartoon books. A local printer will produce paper backs with glossy cover and excellent binding for $3.50 each and will try to market from my blog as a start. I have 450 active subscribers and many have encouraged me to produce the books. Several published authors that follow have offered marketing assistance. I suppose they would take a % and that is fine with me. I will go ahead in a few weeks and get one hundred of each made. I need to find out about estore and paypal and would self sell from my home until I can get a big league firm behind me or at least published authors to manage sale from their base. Any suggestions.

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    1. From what I have heard from others, you are right, Amazon is not well setup to do picture books, i.e. a cartoon book with a lot of images. They are focused on straight text books for their Kindle ereader. It seems you need to focus on getting a good resource for creating a printed version of your work. Have you already tried to work with CreateSpace? I’ve also heard Lulu is good for print books, but I have not personally used them and my books are straight text romance novels.

      I also enjoy your work and would appreciate seeing it available in print. I hope we can hear such good news from you some time (soon)! My best to you always, and while the journey may be frustrating, if you’re able to get your work out there and share it with others in a book you are happy with, the effort will be worth it. Enjoy always and keep us laughing. T

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  2. I did my homework before deciding how to publish my memoir. The biggest factor for me was marketing. I didn’t want to have to promote my book–I wanted to let someone else do that (profits be damned). So I really considered traditional publishers.

    Then I found out that if you are an unknown (like me), those trad pubs make you give them YOUR marketing strategy as part of your pitch to them. They take most of the profits AND make the author do the marketing.

    That did it for me. Self-publishing it was. If I was going to have to do the self-promotion anyway, I might as well get the lion’s share of the profits from my work. And have complete control over my work.

    Thanks for you post and good to hear from you, Tricia! Best of luck on your third book! 🙂

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    1. Lorna,
      You have done such an awesome job of getting to where you are. Best of luck always, and the best thing about you is that you have an outstanding way of creating your own luck. I look forward to reading your book.

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