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.
Wednesday, August 13, 2014
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1 comment:
All power to Event Horizon Press and other small, agile publishers in the coming guerrilla (marketing) war with the corporate fascists who run the Publishing Empire! David Benjamin's Weekly Screed (#687) is but one example. All power, also, to the university presses, the last remaining institution willing to take a chance on writers with an idea in their head and the passion to get the words down on paper in the right order.
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