In the few days since the last post here about Big Five publishers and agency pricing, I have been challenged on two specific points by comments sent privately. Both of these comments are right and therefore lead to this corrective post.
One powerful literary agent, who is inevitably informed by publishers about negotiations that affect the selling prices of ebooks (which, in turn, affect the author royalty), tells me that I have the whole motivation thing on agency backwards. It may have started six years ago as a way for publishers to control the prices of ebooks across the supply chain, so something they were “imposing” on Amazon. But that turned around. It became a way for Amazon to guarantee that they would get a full margin on all agency publishers’ ebook sales (because publishers could lower the ebook price, but the stipulated agency percentage would not be affected). So, in the recent negotiations, the big publishers had no choice about sticking with agency. Amazon insisted that they stick with agency.
The grapevine, although not this agent, also says that the original 70-30 split of revenues that agency began with has been revised in the recent contracts so that Amazon gets a wee bit more than 30 percent. I can’t verify that although, in time, agents should be able to see that picture clearly.
I have had no conversations with any friends in big houses during the recent agency negotiations. The sensitivity around those negotiations, given that they started because of the DoJ’s involvement, was very high. But now I’m being told by people in a position to know that four of the five big publishers think agency has been a big mistake. As one observer sees it, it has bled 25% out of digital sales that have been replaced by physical, resulting in an increased share for Amazon of the print portion of publishers’ businesses.
As it was put to me by one observer, agency in 2010 was a strategy; by 2015 it was a surrender.
The other challenge was a pushback against my claim that print book sales overall are rising. The commenter pointed out that more than the entire print book sales increase shown in industry stats can be accounted for by the rise in sales of adult coloring books, a category which has taken a big leap forward in the past 12 months. For one thing, it is impossible to predict with any accuracy whether or for how long those sales will sustain. But, more importantly, the sales of print that do not include adult coloring books, which have no ebook equivalents and are the good fortune of a few selected companies, are still declining.
So crediting “success” at arresting the print book sales decline to the rise in major publisher ebook prices is also a mistake.
It turns out that the real story of “agency pricing today” is that Amazon demonstrated dazzling marketplace power by keeping all the big publishers on agency terms. And all of the changes in the marketplace, including the degree by which the divison sales within Big Five houses between print and digital may have tilted in favor of print, probably work in Amazon’s favor.
This is the first time in seven years of writing this blog that I have walked back the thrust of a whole post. Ironically, the overall point to what I wrote, questioning whether agency pricing is a good thing for publishers, is correct. What I didn’t know is that most of the publishers have already figured that out but are helpless against a customer so powerful that it dictates the terms.
There is still useful insight in the original, particularly around what might or might not be worthy of anti-trust consideration. But the two core premises — that publishers forced Amazon to accept agency and that doing that had made their print sales go up — are definitely questionable.
The only thing worse than making a mistake is not correcting it.