On the eve of Amazon’s first non-New York event, we’re hearing from multiple sources that the online retailer could be announcing new publishing deals in addition to a slew of updated Kindles tomorrow. Of course there’s speculation that the announcement will be heavily focused on deals made with Hollywood given the [LA] locale, possibly a phone or even an Apple TV competitor. Regardless, we can confirm that Amazon is prepping a publishing focused announcement in the near-term.
Here’s what we’re specifically hearing: Amazon’s Publishing group is in the midst of inking deal with for serialized fiction series’ – think comic books or TV shows or this – that would include audio, print and Kindle editions. Amazon currently does not publish this type of content under any of their publishing groups though they may exist in the self-publishing realm.
After a string of successful Kindle singles, Byliner launched its own series of serials last week with Margaret Atwood in tow. Mark Bryant, Byliner’s editor-in-chief and cofounder, had this to say: “Neatly delivering great page-turning, serialized narratives to readers’ mobile reading devices is the logical next step.”
Last year, Amazon announced multiple imprints – Montlake for romance novels, Thomas & Mercer for mysteries and thrillers, 47North for Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Horror – for various genres. The eight to twelve titles currently in the works will be distributed under different imprints, one source tells us.
To be clear, these serialized fiction titles would not fall under the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), which allows just about anyone to self-publish books for multiple platforms (Kindle, iPhone, Mac, etc.), since Amazon is acquiring the rights to these titles and will also be pushing out print and audio editions. Audible is one of few potential candidates to be handling the audio versions of the upcoming serialized books with Amazon Publishing handling the print runs, we’re told. It’s unclear what the terms of these deals are but we suspect royalties from the digital editions under these new deals will be under the 70 percent royalty mark that publishers under KDP currently receive.
Again, it’s unclear if Amazon will announce these deals tomorrow but we have verified with multiple sources that they’re currently in the works.