During a recent "Writers Speak Wednesdays" event at Stony Brook Southampton, Amazon New York publisher Larry Kirshbaum was interviewed by writer and former Random House editor Daniel Menaker. PaidContent's Laura Hazard Owen featured excerpts from their conversation and observed that "if you wanted to pull one thing out of here, I would note how many times he mentions physical bookstores." A few highlights from the interview:
"Despite the fact that Amazon is a very large company on the retail side, as you all know, we’re really a very small publisher," Kirshbaum said. "We're a startup. We only have about 20, 25 people. It's a very intimate group.... It's a small publisher. In a lot of ways, we are operating it as a small publishing house. We, of course, have this enormous publishing capability because of our websites and stores and our database and all that which we are trying to use to innovative ends to publish well.... I like to model it on the companies I worked for for many years, Warner and Little, Brown."
Calling the Kindle a "reader’s dream," he noted that "although I do still love bookstores and spend a lot of time--I love the Hampton bookstores, in fact--it's a real readers delight to be able to get a book inside of a minute and just start reading because you read a review or whatever."
Kirshbaum also contended the "big problem publishers have is this kind of auction fever that develops on brand-name authors where the price just goes very, very high and it is hard to earn back and make a profit. Our philosophy is going to be to publish across a broad spectrum and to do a lot of books that are discovery books, probably aren't going to have huge advances but we're going to put a lot of marketing money into it."
While acknowledging that there has been criticism of Amazon's methods in some circles, he said "the agents have by and large been extremely excited about the fact that we can publish in a different way. They love the idea of the database, that we can actually reach readers directly, that we can use--of course all of you who are, I'm sure, Amazon customers know the suggestible idea--if you like X, you'll like Y. We'll be the Y. We're going to show some really innovative marketing ideas to sell books in ways that they're not being sold right now."
Photo: WW Burford