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Friday 30 September 2016

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James Franco's Amazon adventure

Actor James Franco is getting Amazon to publish his first novel. Don't bank on him starting a new trend, says Nicholas Clee.

James Franco: 'Not keeping the publishing industry awake at night'
James Franco: 'Not keeping the publishing industry awake at night' Photo: Chris Pizzello/AP

“Publisher Signs Actor to Write Novel” is not usually the stuff of national press headlines. But when the publisher is Amazon every new signing is news, because it is seen as the latest step in the online book retailer’s campaign to take over the entire book industry. Perhaps it is time to calm down a little.

Who are the authors in these headline deals? The latest is the actor James Franco, of whose debut collection of stories Palo Alto, Benjamin Secher wrote in the Telegraph, “the world feels only half alive, the characters in it mere sketches”. There was Deepak Chopra, whose bibliography shows more than 65 previous publications and who has a continuing deal with a mainstream house, the self-help author Timothy Ferriss, and Penny Marshall, who starred in the US sitcom Laverne & Shirley and who directed the Tom Hanks film Big. We’re not talking about James Patterson or Meryl Streep.

Is Amazon Publishing making a mark in bookshops? No: the biggest terrestrial bookseller in the US, Barnes & Noble, declines to stock Amazon’s titles, as do many independent stores. Some stores report that they have never been approached by anyone claiming to represent the list. The publishing analyst Laura Hazard Owen examined the figures and revealed that only a handful of Amazon’s titles had sold more than 1,000 print copies.

The company’s sales of its ebooks were better because of its ability to promote them on its market-dominating platform, the Kindle. (One-fifth of its titles made the Kindle top 100.) Still, many traditional publishers could boast better performances.

Underestimating Amazon, though, would be a terrible mistake. The company has become the largest online retailer in the world through offering a superb service to customers and through formidable negotiating with its suppliers. It was not the first into ebooks, but when it did make its move it quickly established the Kindle as almost synonymous with the form.

It offers authors – both those who self-publish and those who sign with Amazon Publishing – significantly better terms than they can get from the traditional houses. Moreover, its lack of representation in bookshops may become increasingly unimportant, since the competition it provides is putting many of those shops out of business. Perhaps Amazon will become the only retailer in town.

Such dominance in publishing seems unlikely. Some 150,000 new titles come on to the market each year in the UK alone, so it is hard to imagine one publisher taking control of such an environment. It is somewhat easier to imagine the domination of a book retailer. This, rather than deals for the likes of James Franco, is what keeps Amazon’s publishing rivals awake at night.

Nicholas Clee is an editor of BookBrunch

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