Hello Publishers? Wake Up and Smell the Damn Coffee (the Amazon-MacMillan Mess)

Things have gotten pretty wild out there in the publishing world. First, you have publishers who haven't clue one about digital publishing and don't take the steps necessary to find out.

Then this--the big Amazon-MacMillan dust-up. It seems that Amazon objects to MacMillan's high retail prices for e-books, not to mention the timing of their release. (To boost hardcover sales, of all things. Yeah, just when you thought you'd heard it all.) So, now it's reached the point where Amazon simply won't sell MacMillan's books (they can be obtained through the site from third parties).

Here's the memo from MacMillan that's got everyone in an uproar.

Now, I was all set to write a scathing post about how charging way too much for e-books won't help anyone and delaying their release won't affect hardcover sales a whit. But someone beat me to it. Chris Meadows does nice job of summing the whole mess up and rendering a scathing opinion for me. (And thank you, Chris, for that. :))

Now, like Meadows says, Amazon may be a jerk here, but MacMillan is being an even bigger one.

How do I know? From my own experience. I was selling my own mystery novel, IDENTITY CRISIS, for $1.59 a download and making decent (if unspectacular) sales. I dropped the price to $.99 and suddenly sales shot through the roof.

With the drop in price my download sales went from 40 to 70 per month up to hundreds. In fact, would you believe that at $.99, I've sold more than 1,000 downloads in January?

And the notion that delaying an e-book's release to sell hardcovers is laughable. I guess publishers never heard of the library. Duh.

One thing's for sure, the Kindle forums are lit up with discussions about this. Readers are pissed. And not at Amazon.

Oh, and one more thing, here's Amazon's response posted to one of its forums.

Among other things, it says:

"[U]ltimately, . . . we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan's terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books."

Uh, ahem, well thanks for looking out for the readers' interests and all (how noble of you) and, as for the term "monopoly" . . . well, let's not go there, okay?

ADDENDUM: Forgot to include this awesome post by Carolyn Jewel, as well as this one by Mr. Cutting Edge himself, the great Joe Konrath.