Battle of the BEHEMOTHS

As Amazon and the big publishing companies get increasingly supersized, Piers Blofeld ponders on the fallout for authors

Well over ten years ago when I was doing a series of anonymous blogs for The Bookseller (as Agent Orange: a name which seemed funny at the time, but which now makes me wince a little), I wrote a piece – one of many about the challenges to the industry posed by Amazon – entitled, in homage to the song by The Automatic, What’s That Coming Over the Hill?

The monster has emphatically come over the hill by now. Amazon have long since eaten publishing’s lunch and they are now eyeing up, unthinkable a few years ago, British retail behemoths like Tesco and John Lewis.

If 2020 was a good year for publishing it was absolutely stellar for Amazon. In fact, given the number of conspiracy theories there are for the origin of Covid, it’s surprising that on a cui bono basis no one has pointed a finger at Jeff Bezos (and just to be clear Amazon lawyers: that was a joke!).

The thing is I said then – and I think I still believe it now – that if publishing was going to be able to resist Amazon it had to start selling ebooks itself. Publishers, worried about annoying its retail partners, resisted this notion and have instead gone for either accepting the status quo, or in the case of Penguin Random House – now Penguin Random Schuster after November 2020’s acquisition of Simon and Schuster, becoming so big that Amazon will be forced to enter into reasonable terms with them or else there will simply be too many big-name authors they will not have in stock.

It is of course impossible to say how effective this has been, but clearly it was effective enough for Bertelsmann, PRH’s parent to pay £2.2 billion for S&S.

Now in theory you could think that if that is good for the publisher it will be good for authors but I very much fear it will not be. The less competition there is between publishers the less chance there is for authors to get favourable terms and I am afraid that the simple fact is that PRS (if that’s the right acronym) will not only be looking to improve their margin by negotiating up the chain with Amazon, but down it as well with authors and their agents. And who do you think they will find it easier to tale a tough stance with?

We live in a world which is ever more hungry for the value authors and the content they create bring but at the same time one which ever more empowers the supply chain over the product itself. That’s no surprise, it’s the heart of capitalism, a product is only worth what you can find someone to pay for it – and that can be hugely variable.

What has changed is the way in which these things have become so globalised and as a result so big.

Authors are, as a result, firmly members of the club which would not have them as members. But vast global businesses are being built on the back of their creativity and inspiration while at the same time author incomes are dropping.

The world seems set on more and more monopolistic controls of the publishing process. Can the day be far off when authors will have to emerge blinking and reluctant from their solitude and start to unionise, working together to protect their interests and those of the generations of authors yet to come? It’s beginning to feel like an inevitability – and its worth pointing out that the Screen Writers’ Guild of America went on strike and brought Hollywood to its knees in the fight for better terms.

It works.