Anthem Book Blog

There's a piece in today's PW Daily on the possibility of Amazon signing up content direct from authors. Here's the gist:

Amazon would charge $.49 per electronic download for short stories, journalism, essays and other work; the material would be exclusive to Amazon and would not appear in a book or any other form. Material would be in the 2,000-10,000 word range and could include such updates as alternative endings to novels. An audio component could also be in the works; the company is requesting audio rights.

Seems a stretch to me. E-commerce merchants have been trying to crack the micro-payments secret for awhile. Amazon might be a big enough gorilla to make it happen, but even if they do, so what? If they get 10,000 people to download a new Stephen King short story, it's a whopping $5000. 100,000 downloads gets a little better, but how many times can you get a 100,000 people to buy one short story? It's all money, but chump change from a corporate perspective. They would need all 250 authors they're looking to sign-up to sell big, or a few authors to sell in the millions. Good luck.

The real idea here is getting authors used to the idea of selling Amazon the rights to short stories, interviews, and other peripheral writing. What was once marketing and promotion becomes a sales channel. Strange. I'm curious to see where they go with it. But right now it all sounds like a crazy scheme thought up in a staff brainstorm session.