The end of the betseller (by J. Konrath)

This article is really pushing the fact that books have become commodities. They no longer compete on quality but rather with cost. Pricing is less around value and more on cost plus.

I personally believe that there are salient differences between books (quality, time spent, book cover, number of pages, etc.) and having a big name publisher can open many opportunities for new authors just like in the music industry. I guess it would be more accurate to say that publishers can free up authors' time by using the publisher's resources for marketing and distribution, etc.

On a site like Hacker News, we take the success of product differentiation for granted. The best product will differentiate itself based on sound understanding of product development and will thus succeed. It would be unsafe to assume that business aspects are irrelevant.

Lines like this:

[I don't do interviews because] I hate taking time away from my writing, and I'm making enough money to stop doing things that I dislike.

are some of the many reasons I love this blog.

I don't know if that is going to be the experience of most authors, though. I think there is a wee bit of App Store Goldrush going on where the ridiculous superiority of the distribution channel makes marketing less necessary than it previously was for people at the head of the distribution. Konrath -- who I literally take physical notes from when it comes to marketing -- may be able to get by with less hustling than he used to, but I think more authors are going to approach the sort of tactics one uses to sell ebooks or software -- list building, online marketing (aside from just "uploading to Amazon", etc).

I think the same is likely true of the App Store too, come to think of it. Angry Birds can be Angry Birds, but everyone else has to work against the platform's strong incentive to marginalize most of the catalog on any given day.

The rise in availability of entertainment (books, movies, etc) is actually having the opposite effect: the bestseller is more important than ever. With so much to choose from, people are more likely to go on recommendations, and the trend in recommendations has always been that once something (of reasonable quality) gets a little traction it tends to outstrip its competition.

Of course, there's more room for niches (so we might see more domain bestsellers in smaller domains).

Meanwhile, the author of this post, who obviously has a rich marketing background and has used it in this piece, seems to downplay the role of marketing (pretty much all publishers do is marketing) in getting bestsellers going.

As well, any level of anticipation for a title shows that bestsellers are still strong - the post assumes people choose what to buy once they see the shelves, but often they choose before that.

The way "also bought by" on amazon plays out actually helps with this price segmentation. The people on a writer forum I follow noticed that (unsurprisingly) kindle bestsellers tend to have other kindle bestsellers in their also bought list, while other books mostly have books in the same price range (2.99s having other 2.99s, .99s having other .99s, etc) as part of their their also bought lists.

Be curious to see if that continues to play out, however.