A deluge of Amazon Prime Day advice

If your inbox is anything like ours, it's been pinging all morning with emails promising help finding the best savings for Amazon's Prime Day. Today, Hannah Miller gets a little meta, writing about what publishers of such newsletters and articles get out of the deal. Plus: What Indian states are doing to attract new factories, and how some author services companies prey on hopeful writers.

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Amazon.com Inc.'s annual Prime Day is here, and savvy shoppers aren't the only ones excited—check out the deluge of news articles hyping the online sale, with headlines like "The Best Amazon Prime Day Deals We've Found (So Far)" or "I Spend 8 Hours a Day Scrolling Through Amazon, and These 55 Prime Day Deals Under $25 Are Already Live."

The Prime Day event, stretching to four days this year instead of two, provides an opportunity for news organizations looking to revitalize their web traffic during the slower summer months. Readers appreciate the help finding the best markdowns on tech, toys, clothes and more.

An Amazon warehouse in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Photographer: Adolphe Pierre-Louis/Shutterstock

Amazon typically delivers publishers higher commissions during Prime Day on the affiliate links that track sales back to their recommendations, with companies like the New York Times even spotlighting the impact of the event in their earnings reports. For the cash-strapped media industry, which has been gutted by layoffs, any revenue boost can help.

At least so far, sales are lower compared with last year, falling almost 14% in Prime Day's opening hours. It's possible buyers are watching prices to see if the deals go lower. Some sellers are sitting out because they can't afford to offer discounts and are actually boosting prices to offset higher costs from President Donald Trump's tariff policies. Amazon says it's working with sellers to adapt to this economic environment.

All the uncertainty could have a knock-on effect for news sites looking to get a bump in affiliate link revenue. For the media, it would be yet another setback in a year that has seen concern over press freedom, shutdowns of news organizations and threats from the rise of artificial intelligence.

Amazon, of course, has invested heavily in AI, which it says will help power customer experiences during Prime Day, including its Rufus chatbot and audio features that let you listen to deals. It's to be determined how that will affect publishers.

For now, news organizations are taking things one Prime Day at a time as they navigate their changing industry. For them, getting readers to click "Add to Cart" is a win, and even the smallest victories can help.

In Brief

Trump said Fed Chair Jerome Powell should "resign immediately" if allegations from critics proved true that he misled lawmakers about renovations at the central bank's headquarters.
Douglas Elliman, long the epitome of real estate glamour, is shedding its party image after losses spurred agents to exit.
The Transportation Security Administration is planning to update its policies to allow US travelers to keep their shoes on at standard airport security checkpoints.

India Makes a Push Into Manufacturing

Putting the finishing touches on Ather scooters at the company's factory in Hosur, Tamil Nadu. Photographer: Gayatri Ganju for Bloomberg Businessweek

From his office in Bengaluru, the tech capital of India, Benjamin Lin can see the above-ground metro stop that bears his company's name. The Taiwanese maker of electronic components paid 650 million rupees ($7.5 million) for the naming rights, a bid to show the thousands of passengers a day that course through the Delta Electronics Bommasandra station that the company is part of the city's future.

The investment is part of Delta's five-year drive to establish a manufacturing hub in southern India. Besides the spanking-new research-and-development center where Lin and about 400 other Taiwanese and Indian engineers work, the company operates a 125-acre manufacturing facility in Krishnagiri, in the adjacent state of Tamil Nadu. That site churns out electric vehicle chargers as well as equipment that will be used to make iPhones by contract manufacturers for Apple Inc., which has announced plans to source most of its US-destined smartphones from India.

Delta already had two manufacturing plants in northern India, but the company chose to locate its newest factory in Tamil Nadu after the state offered a host of incentives, including a 10-year income tax exemption, says Lin, who became president of Delta's operations in India in 2022. The state was also quick to hook up electricity and water supplies, and its robust infrastructure—including well-paved highways and easy access to the port of Chennai on the eastern coast—was an added bonus. "They're helping us solve many problems," he says.

As manufacturers debate whether to leave China—which has been saddled with some of the steepest US tariffs—India is seeking to cash in. Dan Strumpf and Ruchi Bhatia write about the potential rewiring of supply chains: Will Trade War Make South India the Next Manufacturing Hub?

Inside Incessant Book Publishing Scams

Illustration: Ben Denzer for Bloomberg Businessweek

Kevin Dettler knows he shouldn't have taken the call. But he was flattered. Dettler, 71, is a successful farmer in Doland, South Dakota (pop. 189), where he grows corn and soybeans. Until 2014 he also owned a restaurant called Trophy's Steakhouse in Maricopa County, Arizona, where he and his wife spend winters. A passionate hunter, Dettler had adorned the restaurant with a bevy of taxidermied prizes: elk, bison, bears. By his 60s, he came to believe he had a book's worth of great yarns to share. "Whenever I told my hunting stories, people always commented that I should write a book," he says. In 2012 he self-published one about his quest for the North American Super Slam, an elite big-game award, and sold it at Trophy's. He called it Hunting: You've Got to Be Kidding!

The term "self-publishing" is something of a misnomer, because it often involves the use of a company in the multibillion-dollar field of author services. The main thing author services companies do is print self-published books on demand for a fee. In this model, many author services "agents" also sell writers their firms' editing, marketing and the like. When they're giving writers the hard sell, they might frame this process as an empowering way to circumvent traditional gatekeepers, but critics say the author services industry is plagued by predatory sales practices and fraud. "Almost by definition, people in that space have been bad actors, because they are posing as publishers and pretending to be something they aren't," says Orna Ross, director of the Alliance of Independent Authors, an advocacy group.

Dettler was among those who felt exploited. He'd spent thousands of dollars on online book promotion from a company called Lettra Press LLC and didn't feel like he'd gotten much for the money. So he was surprised when his former agent there, Tim Nola, called him in the summer of 2020 to say he'd quit Lettra and joined a competitor called PageTurner Press & Media, based in San Diego. Nola said he was calling because Dettler's hunting book had stood out in his memory for its moneymaking potential. All Dettler would have to do was lay out a little seed money, he said, and a major publisher would be sure to take interest in printing Hunting: You've Got to Be Kidding! Oh, and by the way, he wasn't going by the name Tim Nola anymore. From now on, he said, Dettler should call him Ray Ross.

"I should have hung up, but I didn't," Dettler says now. "I was greedy. I have to admit that."

The requests for money didn't stop there. Now the Department of Justice says PageTurner used promises of mainstream success and Netflix deals to prey on more than 800 aspiring authors. Brent Crane tells the rest of Dettler's story and more: 'Our Goal Is to Get Their Money': Inside a Firm Charged With Scamming Writers for Millions

Texas Tragedy

104

That's how many people have been confirmed dead, according to the Associated Press, in floods that tore through central Texas over the weekend. It's a grim milestone as searchers use boats, dogs and drones to locate victims and authorities debate whether more could've been done to prevent the disaster. In Bloomberg Opinion, Michael R. Bloomberg writes that the floods were made worse by climate denialism.

Mental Health Care

"In times of uncertainty, we try to see if there are efficiency efforts that we can embark on because there isn't a bottomless drawer of money. But there is a bottomless pit of need."

Katherine Mague,

Senior vice president of quality, development, communications and social justice at the Behavioral Health Network in Massachusetts

Mental health providers, the fastest-growing industry in the US since the start of the pandemic, risk a sharp reversal of fortune as Trump seeks to eliminate billions of dollars in funding that enabled their expansion.