Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) Wants to Help Tell Your Story, But Is Amazon Stock a Buy?

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With Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) stock trading near all-time highs over $280 per share, you can’t help wondering what’s driving it. After all, the company has a variety of interests including its core retail website, cloud computing services, and high-margin electronic goods sales through its low-margin Kindle tablet devices.

Lately, however, I’ve spent some time highlighting the fact that Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) seems dead set on fostering the ideas and thoughts of its users to take advantage of the growing e-book and streaming video markets.

It’s a fan’s world
For instance, Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) recently unveiled “Kindle Worlds”, a commercial publishing platform to enable writers to earn up to 35% royalties by creating fan-fiction based on a variety of original works and characters. While Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) has only secured the rights to Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, and Vampire Diaries, that’s still a great start considering those properties come built in with millions of fans already. Better yet, writers can keep their eyes peeled for fresh opportunities after Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) promised more titles will arrive soon.

Then, last week Amazon announced announced that it will soon develop five original television pilot episodes into full-fledged series. Naturally, Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) once again put the reins in fans’ hands as the series were chosen based on the votes of viewers from among 14 possible pilots. The five shows, for their part, came from the more than 15,000 movie scripts and 3,600 series pilot scripts submitted to Amazon Studios since its launch in November 2010.

For the storyteller in you …
On Friday, the folks at Amazon Studios unveiled another tool for scriptwriters, dubbed Amazon Storyteller.

amazon stock, amazon storyteller

Image source: Amazon.

Storyteller, for its part, is a slick little tool that can take a script from rich text format and translate it into a storyboard. Through storyboards, writers can help audiences visually capture the essence of a film by either telling the full story or by offering it in short form, almost like a trailer. In Amazon’s words, “Either approach can be a great way to build an audience for your story and see how people respond to it.”

… there’s money to be made
Of course, remember that the massive number of scripts I mentioned guarantees there will be competition, but there’s little reason to wonder why; if your TV script gets chosen for Amazon’s Development slate, Amazon will pay you a cool $10,000. What’s more, you also stand to earn paid directing opportunities, and, if your series gets chosen for production, they’ll pay you an extra $55,000 plus up to 5% of net merchandising receipts from toy and T-shirt licensing.

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