When is an indie bookstore not an indie bookstore? When it’s Amazon.
Amid the hubbub over their (admittedly awesome) Cloud Reader, Amazon today launched their Kindle Indie Bookstore. This storefront showcases indie books and indie authors, which is to say, those publishing on the Kindle platform without a traditional publisher. Their announcement is short and sweet, and their FAQ isn’t much longer. The gist is that Amazon is using “a combination of automated techniques and editorial activities” to identify those books already doing well, so that it can boost their visibility. Authors can’t submit their titles for inclusion in the Indie Bookstore. And that’s probably for the best.
It’s hard to imagine the general public taking an interest in indie books for their own sake. Amazon excels, however, at recommendations and placement, and they have the analytics at their disposal to target customers who are most likely to buy indie titles. Assuming, that is, that they promote the new storefront.
After reading the announcement I went looking for the Indie Bookstore. My first instinct when shopping for books is to look under “Books” (I am so old fashioned) but no, they have a separate category for “Kindle Books,” of course, so I went there. No section displaying books from the Indie Bookstore. No eye-catching feature, not even a headline. Here’s where you find the Indie Bookstore:
don't blink.
Right below “Free” and above “Textbook Rental.” But this obviously was a quiet launch. If they’d wanted fanfare they wouldn’t have announced it at the same time as the Cloud Reader. It will be interesting to see how it affects indie sales. For a moment I considered the possibility that this is the first step toward segregating indie books from other Kindle titles, which would be a serious blow for indie authors. That doesn’t seem like a smart move for Amazon, though: it would reduce their sales of indie titles and reduce their appeal to indie publishers. The only real motive they might have to separate indie books would be to avoid cluttering up the Kindle store, but their recommended and related product algorithms prevent clutter from being a big issue.
At the very least, the Indie Bookstore will give indie authors something to aspire to and brag about.
