Posts
After posting my last blog, WHO’S AFRAID OF AMAZON.COM?, on May 27, it immediately went viral, appearing on Business Insider, Forbes, Bloomberg News, and Yahoo Financial, and included interviews in Forbes and Business Insider, which gave me an opportunity to expand my comments. Amazon.com also posted it. The Cockeyed Pessimist received over 30,000 hits, I had countless email responses, and God knows how many others read it from these various sources. The Financial Times of London asked me to write an Op-Ed piece, which was published on June 2 and sent to their 300,000 subscribers.
That blog was written in
response to a business article in The New
York Times written by David Streitfeld and Melissa Eddy, which seemed to
contradict the reality of our own experiences with Amazon. No sense repeating
them here—all you need do is go back to that previous blog to follow the
argument. One of the things I’ve learned since then is that over 85% of the
small and independent publishers who responded to my blog had the exact same
experiences with Amazon that I had and shared my viewpoint.
It also appears that Streitfeld
and Eddy have dug in on their position, for they continue to present a mixture
of hypothesis and rumor (which, to their
credit, they report as such), but also adding dollops of innuendo by painting
Amazon as the villain in the dispute with Hachette and the other four
publishing conglomerates. These huge multi-national corporations may be filled
with fears and uncertainties, but the reporters ignore the fact that there are over
3,000 publishers in the US (according to a recent report in Literary Market
Place). What works for the Big Five does
not necessarily work for the other 2,995 of us, any more than the richest 1% of
our population represent what the other 99% of us desire. In fact, Amazon has provided huge benefits
and advantages to small, independent publishers, unprecedented in my 35 years as
a publisher.
On May 30, two separate articles
appeared in the Times. They cite
“rumors” that Amazon is willing to alienate customers because it is selling
Kindle titles at too low a price and are willing to lose money in the process. In a
second article Hachette author Michael Gladwell was interviewed, who by his own
account has earned millions of dollars for his books and goes on to describes
Amazon—along with his publisher –as “partners.” He wonders why his partner
Amazon, who must also have earned millions from his book would abandon him by
not taking pre-orders well ahead of publication date for his next book.
I know that Amazon won’t take
pre-orders from us unless we can ship books within the time frame of expected
delivery. Perhaps they have a different
deal with the Big Five, but I’m not privy to their negotiations. What I do know
is that the Department of Justice ordered that discussions between Hachette and
Amazon be held in private, without commentary from either
side. Still, in one of Streitfeld’s postings his final line was “An Amazon
spokesman declined to comment.” He
didn’t refer to the DOJ injunction, which also applies to Hachette, leaving the
impression that Amazon alone is intentionally hiding something dishonorable.
I’ve read that another Hachette
millionaire author stated that pre-orders from Amazon help determine print runs.
I do know that pre-orders of books, before knowing how many copies are destined
to be sold, puts an impossible burden on all publishers, since this is the only
industry that sells on consignment, allowing bookstores (and Amazon is an
on-line bookstore) and wholesalers to return books for full credit, and most
publishers—large and small—receive returns of 20% to 80%. Nonetheless, it’s been a blessing to be able
to address media reporting that not only seems one-sided, but is doubtlessly
bringing great joy to the Big Five’s well-staffed PR departments.
I can also tell you that on-line
journalists and bloggers have been generally far more supportive of my views
than most print journalists. But change seems to be coming in print, too. On
the OP-ED page of the New York Times
on Saturday, May 31, Bob Kohn, who represented the Big Five and failed to win
their case when the Justice Department found them guilty of collusion was at it
again, writing a difficult to follow screed, How Book Publishers Can Beat Amazon, while the columnist Joe Nocera dismissed all of this as nonsense in a
beautifully rational, and balanced way
in his article, Amazon’s ‘Bullying’
Tactics, which I’d urge you to read.
What all this does is get a
conversation going where everyone can have their say, not just the privileged
few.
