Delivering on Digital Promises: One Indie Author’s Beef With Amazon

June 12, 2012 · Posted in M&E Daily, Today's M&E Connections 

by Terence Keegan

Amazon famously offers authors who self-publish through its Kindle Direct Publishing program a 70 percent royalty rate. But one bestselling Amazon author shows how the cost to deliver his Kindle book to customers — which the retailer deducts from payouts to authors who choose its “70 percent” option — winds up representing more than a quarter of his book’s $9.99 list price.

Consequently, travel author Andrew Hyde notes, Amazon keeps a bigger cut of his eBook revenues than either Apple’s iBooks or Barnes & Noble’s Nook (via BoingBoing).

Hyde’s tour through his recent Kindle publishing experience offers rare first-hand data points on the true cost of digital delivery. His critique of Amazon’s policy is reminiscent of the call from music acts, a decade ago, for record labels to provide them with more detailed accounting of manufacturing and distribution expenses (see, for example, this 2003 piece from the Loyola of Los Angeles Entertainment Law Review, discussing auditing of manufacturing and distribution documents in the context of artist royalty accounting).

Regardless of whether you agree with Hyde’s “129,000% markup” analysis, the author implicitly poses an interesting question on the value of a proprietary platform like Kindle in the age of digital distribution — which by conventional account has wrung out costs and intermediaries from the entertainment supply chain.

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