MetaGame getting published by AmazonEncore

Ding! Ding! Ding! First blog post on here!

My book MetaGame has been selected to get published by AmazonEncore, a new publishing division of Amazon.com. They'll release it in Sept. Pre-order here, baby!

Isn't it interesting that an online bookstore publishes their own books?

It's kind of like a grocery store selling their own brand of bread, milk, and yogurt... Oh, wait they already do that. In my neck of the woods there's a chain of grocery stores called Safeway which has their own "Safeway Select" brand of all kinds of typical food items. Same thing with their competitor down the road, Fred Meyer.

So why not do the same thing with books? The bookstore publishes it's own books and keeps a larger share of the profits. Good stuff.

Here's how it works: As you may know, anyone can publish a Kindle book on the Amazon store at no cost to you and you can charge whatever you want for the book. These folks are called "indie authors". Amazon takes a cut of anything sold this way and so you'd think it would end there, but the company did something clever. Because they're Amazon, they can analyze their own sales, ratings, and other data to determine indie books that show potential. An editor That's when AmazonEncore gets in there. The author gets free editing, new cover art, some promotion, etc and then their book is re-released.

Hey, it works for me!

But wait, AmazonEncore is evolving. It has only existed for about a year and it has already outgrown it's name. They're not just re-releasing successful indie books, they're now taking on some new unpublished manuscripts, just like a traditional publisher.

Ask any economist and they'll tell you competition is good and so I suppose AmazonEncore is doing their part to keep costs down and maybe enabling a few extra authors (authors like me) to sell a few extra books.

Your comments welcome, of course.

Sam