The response, and the letter:
Dear Mr. Hall,
What a pleasure to find this gem of reason and articulateness amid the nearly five thousand emails kindly launched my way by Amazon’s message to KDP users! Thank you for writing and reminding me of the sanity and sense and higher accomplishments that the collaboration between publishers and writers can attain.
Thanks again and very best wishes,
Michael
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Dear Mr. Pietsch,
Amazon sent an email encouraging me to reach out to you to berate Hachette on fighting them on e-book prices. I have included that email here, though I am sure you have seen it.
Their email offended me on many fronts, and I gave it great consideration in the last few days. Finally, I decided to share my thoughts about it with you . . .
First, as a consumer I sincerely believe you (your company, your staff, your imprints, your authors) are entitled to charge anything you want for your books. In the end, the customers / marketplace should inform what you charge, not wholesalers and internet distributors. Amazon trying to dictate pricing by saying they have the consumer's best interest at heart and asking me to reach out to you about it is an unsettling development.
The first thing that bothered me about their email is they called George Orwell a technological throwback.
It's quite clueless on Amazon's part to include him in their email to writers. For example, I could also say Orwell was just worked up about those little Penguin paperbacks being cheap and falling apart. Or maybe he was worried about the cheap price point and making even less money. Or maybe this quote was taken completely out of context and is missing the rest of it. But really, as Orwell might have said in this situation, we could say Orwell said anything "we" want him to say. This is the very definition of Orwellian. And it really appears Amazon did just that.
History rhymes? No, history does repeat itself because absolute power corrupts absolutely. There is something quite wrong about their portrayal of the big publishing houses. Competing publishers are a great thing for consumers. Even if they have become part of giant media conglomerates, as long as we have four or five of them and some large independents fighting it out for customer share, consumers will be okay. We've seen this before in other industries (movie studios, car companies, even oil companies, er, maybe.) Get enough giants after each other for customers, the customers come out reasonably ahead for the most part. It's quite clear behind their spin that this e-book pricing debate is not about money, it's about control. They want to wrestle control of something away from you, something that is yours. And absolute control is bad for all. It always is.
Then I realized Amazon appears to be asking me to help them take this control.
I am one of those authors toiling away for years without any recognition. But, I also have the unique perspective of having worked at a small independent publisher, and now I work in risk analysis software. In these day jobs, I've learned two most vital things that I didn't learn just writing: the decision you make with gut instinct, informed by years of refined experience, simply cannot be algorithmed and quantified. The choices an active participant in publishing makes about what book to publish, feature where, how many in the first print run, what people get the review copies first, even what books staff love and have sincere hopes and are rooting for . . . Amazon has absolutely no interest in any of this because they don't understand it. But they understand how to analyze and dominate. And so they try that with me, calling on self published authors to send their missives to you, craftily knowing they are preaching to a choir of dejected authors who couldn't cut it at one of your imprints, or even get anything read by them. It could be that they are using this situation to create a team of writers on their side, ready for their next step.
And where does that lead? Does Amazon actually want to crush publishers, gather a fleet of authors, generate content themselves, and distribute it all via download? Maybe the real question is . . . why wouldn't they want this? That seems to fit them just right. We should expect no less from them.
Another issue in their letter, books only compete against books, no echoing inside the box on that one. A customer may say "should I buy a book or pay my data plan?" but this should be way outside the realm of any discussion about book sales. Again they are worried about control, this time over time management, (book vs. Facebook.) And we know books are the very best source material for movies. They certainly don't compete against movies. Finally, I guess we either believe their statement about how distracted we all or, or we don't. I'm sure there is data out there proving any point.
The elastic argument about e-book pricing in Amazon's email is wrong. As a consumer, it would be fine by me if publishers charge what a trade paperback costs, minus the actual printing cost that you pay a printer, since all the other upfront costs are the same for any book. Amazon doesn't know what the upfront costs of a book are. They don't appear to have a clue about all that goes into developing a title. I'm sure they don't care. So they talk about warehouses and trucks and returns and cost of doing business in their spin, the tangibles they want to totally get rid of for book distribution, anyway.
Plus, no warehousing means that whole group of people are no longer employed to buy books. I guess they can all go to work in IT and solve all the server screw ups. But after a day of that, their minds are too fried to read. This I know.
And one more thing, royalty checks: Baaaah! I'll tell you, authors want advances. Who makes real royalty checks? 10% of authors? Promising royalties to untested authors is lotto. Again, it's manipulating them.
We all know technology disruptors are the very first to tell you "You're a stick in the mud if you resist change. Get onboard or get out of the way!" A technology disruptor that is also a company that wants to be the biggest thing in the world . . . well, we sci fi authors and fans know how that can turn out. If nobody fights them, gets them to adapt, change, agree, find a reasonable middle ground, we're hosed. We can see if this prediction bears out. Amazon's next step might be to make their print book distribution channel more restrictive, cumbersome, difficult for publishers, until they dissolve it. Meanwhile, they're working on the "long tail" of self published authors out there to rise against you by spinning Orwell.
What would George Orwell say about all this? He'd say fight total control at all costs. Especially if the element that is trying to take control is a digital oligarch.
At least, that's what I say he would say.
Yours respectfully,
Jameson
Jameson Hall
Five Cent Apocalypse Productions and Media
PO Box 666
Ithaca, NY 14851
