Critical Feedback:
The article “Amazon Underground: A new business model for book publishing?” provides a good discussion of a way that authors can make money from advertising. The author gives some unique insights, like the discussion between the different businesses of selling content to an audience versus selling an audience to advertisers. The author even provides data to support her argument, in the form of an analysis of earnings from the Amazon Underground program and its comparison to the Canadian average income. She shows that an author would need to have their book(s), read 1,141 hours a day for a year to earn an average annual income of $50,000. This data supports the author's conclusion that it would be very difficult for authors, especially new authors, to make a living just from Amazon Underground. The use of Creative Commons (CC) licenses, however, means that authors are free to publish their works in other areas in order to increase their income above their Underground earnings.
Although the discussion in this article is mostly complete and good evidence is provided, there are a few important points that are missing. The first is that authors already have access to advertising revenues in the form of a blog. Authors can earn revenue from blogs that use Google AdSense or by selling ad spots directly to advertisers. Although blogs require a very large audience to generate significant revenue, and it may be equally or more difficult to make a living blogging than using Amazon Underground, they do have some advantages. They give authors more control over the distribution and licensing of content. If the author blogs on their own website they may also have control over the price and placement of advertisements. Underground authors have no bargaining power and must accept Amazon's terms. Amazon's program also provides some advantages over blogging. Amazon has the resources to offer bonuses and there is a large audience of millions of Kindle e-reader and Fire tablet users. The Amazon Underground program also relieves authors of the burden of having to manage their own advertising and blogging site. This gives authors more time to focus on writing and producing content that generates income.
Another relevant topic of discussion that is missing from this article is the impact of advertising in software apps. The author mentions advertising in apps as an inspiration for this publishing model. A discussion of how advertising in apps has affected software developers and publishers would be valuable information for readers. Has the shift away from paid downloads to software-as-a-service, in-app purchases and in-app advertising had a positive or negative effect on software developer and publishers' incomes? This is a topic much broader than the original topic, so it is not surprising it was not included in the author's article. Evidence from the software industry may, however, have an impact on the author’s conclusions. A hypothesis is that advertising makes it easier for large publishers with many funds for user acquisition (or reader acquisition in the case of book publishing) to earn income, but harder for individual authors or small publishers with fewer funds. Under this new model independent authors and small publishers will have more competition from lower-priced (free) products and will need to acquire a large audience of dedicated readers in order to earn income. Free product competition from programs like Underground also makes it more difficult for authors to sell e-books at any price.