Shame On You, amazon.com
If you’re human, and you can read, chances are good that you’ve purchased something, at some time, from amazon.com. And who can blame you? Their prices are excellent, they allow readers to write reviews, and they’ve lived up to their claim of being the “largest bookstore on earth.”
But have you heard the rumors? Have you felt the earth tremble with the groans of small publishers?
Amazon feels it would “better serve” its online community by printing and publishing POD titles from its own subsidiary, BookSurge. Currently, the bookstore giant is attempting to strong arm independent and small publishers into printing only at BookSurge…using language typically reserved for thugs and hit-men. Print with us or we de-activate the sale buttons on your titles is only slightly more eloquent than Pay us the protection money or Vinnie here will break your thumbs.
So what’s a small publisher to do? Sit back? Let Amazon rule the world….One bookstore to rule them all, one bookstore to find them, one bookstore to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them…?
There are those of us who enjoy reading things besides John Grisham and Janet Evanovich and Nora Roberts and Stephen King. Not that these guys aren’t great. They are. They are fabulous. But by cutting off the small publishers, Amazon tightens the noose around the mid-list novelist’s neck…and the necks of those not on the mid-list.
Come on, Amazon, lighten up. Read something. Read something good. Something original. Something non-formulaic. There are a lot of great writers out there. And the world wants to hear what they have to say. So back off.
1 comment:
The older I get, the more cynical. I am published through a small independent out of Canada, Kunati Books. They do a wonderful job. But as a debut novelist, I would be hard-pressed to find any success if I were forced to have my book sold only on Amazon. Where's the fun of doing book events on-line? Amazon wants to take the human element out of reading and writing. This, my dear, is the result of rampant capitalism. Maybe the independent presses need to form their own union, form their own mass on-line bookstore and screw Amazon.
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