The Weekly Screed (#687)

Collateral damage in
the war against Amazon
by David Benjamin

“Thank you for thinking of us and reaching out for a book event. Unfortunately we will have to decline as it is our company policy not to schedule events for any Amazon/CreateSpace titles. If, at some point in the future, you choose to publish with a different company…”
           — Sarah Hill, Events Coordinator, Books Inc., Palo Alto

Sarah, I'd be kidding you if I said I really care about your rejection of an event for my novel, A Sunday Kind of Love. Indeed, were you to allow it, the show would be fun. I could probably put together a crowd of 20 to 40 people among friends and followers in the Bay Area. You’d sell a few books, we’d both make a little money.

But if you were to offer solace to just one of your hundreds of blacklisted authors, you'd be compromising your retail principles. And me? By gouging out one tiny crack in the dike of bookseller solidarity, I'd be accomplishing — in the long run — very little.

Nor could I do any good — although I wish I could — for Books Inc. I've always loved bookstores. My publisher, a wise but curmudgeonly geezer who's been in the book biz since before you were born, reminds me ad nauseam that rinky-dink, brick-and-mortar booksellers are killing themselves. As earnestly as I argue against his fatalism, I'm further convinced that he's right every time I receive a boilerplate kiss-off like yours.

You see yourself, and your bookshop comrades, in a moral crusade against the Evil Empire of Amazon. But as you wage this jihad, you ineluctably ally with a host of empires equally ruthless, comparably large and similarly grotesque.

Since my agent died in 2012, abruptly severing my fortunes from the great Manhattan book establishment, I've been storming an empire of agents and editors (all of them indentured to the giant publishing cartel) who collude to narrow the range of acceptable manuscripts into a set of narrative straitjackets (called genres) whose formulaic contents are deemed readily recognizable by a bovine reading public and marketable as cheaply, predictably and conventionally as possible. Even so-called "literary fiction" (a tautology that no one perceives any longer as a tautology) has been canned, vacuum-sealed and brand-labeled in ways that would deny a majority of our prickly forebears in prose — from Jim Thompson to William Faulkner — any hope of representation or publication in today's market.

And Huck Finn? Forget about it!

Agents and editors are symbiotic partners with the major Manhattan publishing houses, who have long proscribed any independent approach by any individual writer, regardless of wit or worthiness. Connected to neither of the great, incestuous empires of New York, the agentless writer is invisible.

Despite these handicaps, I’ve persevered, querying agents relentlessly, buttonholing editors (all of them appalled at my temerity) and reaching out directly to publishers. One publisher heeded my overtures. He’s really small, but able to produce high-quality books quickly and efficiently. He can make changes on-the-fly (unlike the big publishing houses) because he adopted one of the book industry’s true innovations, the ability to print small lots on demand, much like the kanban system that made the Japanese auto industry the world leader in its field.

Alas, the current — and apparently the only — repository of this revolutionary technology is Amazon, the Evil Empire. Why major publishers choose not to exploit this technology is a mystery. When Toyota introduced the kanban (“just-in-time”) inventory system, every carmaker in the world had to emulate or die.

General Motors chose to emulate. Borders preferred to die.

When I made common cause with little, tiny Event Horizon Press, I didn't know I was joining an Evil Empire, nor did I realize how many other empires were arrayed against me. I didn't know that no bookseller would accept my novel unless it’s distributed by a logistics monster of Amazonian hugeness — an outfit called Ingram. I had no idea that the last big-box bookseller in America, Barnes & Noble, would refuse me summarily because I lack Ingram’s stamp of approval. Nor did I understand that, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with all the anti-Amazon empires —  the army of Agents and Editors, the Giant Manhattan Publishing Megalopoly, a few Colossal Book Distributors, and even arch-enemy Barnes & Noble — were all the brave little independent soul-selling bookmongers, like you.

Meanwhile, I’m still learning about the tendentious, bought-off chorus of so-called “literary critics” — including empire-scale review factories like Kirkus — who patronize only the publishing and distribution giants and sell glowing reviews to any author, or publisher, or editor, or sucker willing to pay up-front ($750 — cheap!) for a cookie-cutter rave.

Like every bookseller I’ve talked to, you dismissed my efforts to erase the Amazon stigma from my novel, A Sunday Kind of Love. I acquired a non-Amazon ISBN number and established a unique non-CreateSpace supply chain. By arduously assembling this alternative to Amazon. I thought I was affording you the opportunity — if you had an ounce of initiative, an iota of real independence — to stock my books at a discount not quite as Walmart-low as Ingram’s, but substantial nonetheless and more generous than most well-run retail businesses ever see.

I offered you a harmlessly subversive and very small coalition of small guys — me, my publisher, my printer and you. No empires involved.

I can tell by your reply that you didn’t even consider this. You probably didn’t even read to the bottom of the page.

Why should you bother? Enticed, seduced, co-opted and prostituted by your own network of lesser-evil empires, booksellers don't need to be well-run businesses. You guys thrive on the parasitic perks — returns and trades — that have rendered you slavishly dependent on vast, soulless conglomerates like Bertelsmann and NewsCorp, all of them run by main-chance nazis every bit as creepy as Jeff Bezos.

I once thought that, as a little-known, make-a-living, working-class author, I was in the same boat with small, overworked, book-business entrepreneurs like you. But two years of virtual banishment from the book racket have taught me that, OK, I might be alone in a boat without a paddle and not much hope…

But you, Sarah — and Books Inc. — and all the other little bookstores who've turned your back on nice-guy authors like me and the readers whom I cannot reach without you, you're sailing third-class on the Titanic, two feet below the water line and just above the screws.

Bon voyage.