Are Amazon’s Entrepreneur-Publishers Messed Up?
24th October 2023
Alex Kaplo lives, apparently, the life of Riley. The thirty-one-year-old’s website shows him roaring around in a Mercedes, and he boasts of taking “extravagant” vacations and living in a high-end apartment. He has made all his money, as it turns out, as a “publishing chief executive.” He has caused hundreds of books to be released, none of which he has written.
His story appears, alongside a few others, in a report in yesterday’s Sunday Times about the people who are really getting rich from publishing these days. And, spoiler alert: it isn’t traditional publishers, still less (ha ha) actual authors. It is a new breed of entrepreneur who scours Amazon for popular search terms, identifies undersupplied gaps in the market, and commissions ghostwriters — or, in some cases, AI — to fill them fast and fill them cheap.
Amazon’s direct-to-kindle publishing and print-on-demand facilities mean that anyone, now, can set up as a publisher. And with margins of between 35 and 70 percent for authors who self-publish directly through Amazon (which can, it seems, include those with the nous to commission a ghostwritten text for a flat fee), even a modest sale can be profitable. As Mr. Kaplo says, “You’re hiring a writer to write the book for you and you will claim all the rights to the book, including all future royalties. You own the license, they own nothing.”
Modern technology makes it very convenient for bad people to be as bad as they want to be.