This week, Amazon Publishing celebrates a decade in existence.

I remember when Amazon starts this endeavor, and how Big Publishing simultaneously looked down their collective nose and quaked in their collective boots. At that time, Amazon already controlled the lion’s share of the market. The company released the Kindle in 2007. After owning the marketshare, starting to own the medium on which books would be read, the company logically went after the third leg of the tripod — content.

The first book published by Amazon’s imprint was was Cayla Kluver’s Legacy, released in August 2009. That book did not go on to be a big blockbuster for the company, but several others did, including Mark Sullivan’s Beneath a Scarlet Sky and Blake Crouch’s Pines. 

Amazon figured out — far ahead of other publishers — that controlling the data of book buyers was the key to generation repeat sales.. If you know what people like to read, and you can tailor what books they see when they log onto your site, you can make suggestions that your readers might like. If they do like those suggestions, they keep coming back for more. Even to this day, this is not a model that Big Publishing is capable of matching. 

In the world of books, Amazon is king.

The company has so much data that when they now release a book, they can throw a couple of Wizard Behind the Curtain levers and boom, that book sells thousands — if not hundreds — of copies. 

Amazon’s dominance of the publishing world has not peaked. Far from it. They will continue to grow. As they gobble up big name writers — they just gave Sylvia Day a seven-figure advance for a novella, a 203-page book — they will further marginalize small publishers and even the Big Five. Amazon has deep coffers that the company has barely begun to tap.

Sorry, publishing world, it’s all over but the crying. By Amazon Publishing’s 20th anniversary, they might be the only Big left standing.

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Stan Lee died today.

Stan Lee was a remarkable creator and a dedicated advocate of his chosen genre. He spent his life being an ambassador for the work he loved, which is loved in turn by millions around the world. It’s easy to recognize what a gift that was to the rest of us, but I have little doubt it was just as fulfilling for him.

I was not a big comic book reader as a kid. Of course, I knew about the Marvel superheroes, and the Incredible Hulk was on the television once a week, suffering through his tortured existence and scaring the bejeezus out of wee little me. So I knew about comic book heroes, even if I wasn’t much into the comics themselves.

Of course, these days I bet there are folks who don’t even realize the Fantastic Four or Spidey were ever part of a physical comic book, but just know them from their many origin-story movies. Same with the Incredible Hulk. Stan Lee created characters that people discovered on television, in movies, reading graphic novels, comic books or cartoons. Even live-action entertainment … Marvel Universe Live anyone? Once discovered, Stan Lee’s creations are loved and admired for years and years.

That is undeniably a mark of a stellar and varied career, remarkable by itself. Once you add some metrics around how loved and admired Stan Lee’s cast of characters really are, it’s humbling and awe-inspiring. It’s a helluva thing to have added “with great power comes great responsibility” to the nerd lexicon, and even moreso to have had a decades long involvement with it, and so much love and acknowledgement for these creations. As a partner at a very small entertainment company, it’s also motivating and inspirational.

At Empty Set, we see our job as “making cool things for cool people” and we take our work very seriously. Even when that work is silly, or funny, or obviously not real here on Earth. Entertaining is essential work, I have no doubt. As Stan Lee said himself, “entertainment is one of the most important things in people’s lives. Without it, they might go off the deep end. I feel that if you’re able to entertain, you’re doing a good thing.”

Farewell, Stan Lee. Thank you for sharing so much of yourself with us. Excelsior!