Amazon Offers Writers An Alternate Publishing Platform

In a very bold move in the world of literature, Amazon has presented writers with an aggressive platform to publish and has come up with an alternate publishing solution. Amazon will publish 122 books this fall in an array of genres, in both physical and e-book form. Amazon is going to give all universal publishing houses especially those based in America a run for their money.

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Amazon have done some fairly good homework and have set up a flagship line run by a publishing veteran, Laurence Kirshbaum, former chief executive of the Time Warner Book Group to head its New York Imprint. Krishbaum has already got to the task and has begun in style. He signed Amazon’s first deal with the self-help author Tim Ferriss. It is the first major acquisition for its New York-based publishing imprint by snapping up the rights to bestselling self-help author Timothy Ferriss's new book ‘The 4-Hour Chef’. Last week it announced a memoir by the actress and director Penny Marshall. All names which bring excitement and energy to the new venture. The online retailer has moved aggressively into publishing over the last year, with imprints covering everything from romance to literature in translation, mysteries and thrillers.

Publishers say Amazon is aggressively wooing some of their top authors. Amazon is directly threatening the services that publishers, critics and agents used to provide. Many wise men in the publishing market have openly stated their concern has expressed fear of Amazon. Amazon executives declined to say how many editors the company employed, or how many books it had under contract. But they played down Amazon's power and said publishers were in love with their own demise.

Amazon has started giving all authors, whether it publishes them or not, direct access to highly coveted Nielsen BookScan sales data, which records how many physical books they are selling in individual markets like Milwaukee or New Orleans. It is introducing the sort of one-on-one communication between authors and their fans that used to happen only on book tours. It made an obscure German historical novel a runaway best seller without a single professional reviewer weighing in. Amazon in short is eliminating all the middle men and giving all the budding authors out there a comfortable medium to sit back relax and put all the effort in writing the book rather than worrying about running from pillar to post.

Amazon has revolutionized the lives of authors. To be a little more specific, ten writers have now sold more than a million copies of their books through Amazon's Kindle store. Janet Evanovich and Kathryn Stockett are the two latest authors to do so. Others include Stieg Larsson, James Patterson, Nora Roberts, Charlaine Harris, Lee Child, Suzanne Collins, Michael Connelly and John Locke.

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