I stand with Amazon in this preposterous battle with Hachette and their parent company Lagardere. When I was in the final year of my Undergraduate Writing Degree program in 2000, I purchased every Kurt Vonnegut novel ever written from Amazon over a period of six months. I remember that experience as being revolutionary because I could read other books while I waited for mine to arrive. I remember purchasing and downloading Stephen Kings e-novella The Plant in 2001, thinking that the future was almost here. I felt a momentum shifting and it changed my strategy as an author. It made me patient. I threw away the old model of sending out stories to get rejection letters because it was simply a waste of damn time. I wasnt interested in an agent anymore because I could sense that just over the horizon, there was a new world for authors and there would be much longer levers for us to use. That new world arrived with the Kindle reader. I fell in love from the first time I turned the power button on. This was power as a reader, a digital bookstore that could fill a lifetime of reading, a lifetime of writing. But I was appalled by the cost of many e-books--the same as or in some cases more than the paper hard backs that I to drive or walk to or wait for the mail to deliver. It was outrageous and it turns out there was a reason why--because a large media conglomerate was artificially propping up a stone wall in the free market in the exchange of ideas. As a citizen, I believe one of the greatest forces of cultural retardation is the enormous power that lobbyist groups and corporate lawyers use against the consumer by propping up decaying business processes for the short-term benefit of corporations who have built their enterprises around sales, operations and servicing models that are simply inefficient and unworthy of what the modern consumer deserves. It is time for this to change and I believe that the Amazon model of Kindle Direct Publishing puts this power squarely into the hands of individual authors in a way that has never before been seen since monks copied the coptic manuscripts of the church for limited distribution in the closed publishing model of the medieval churches of Europe. I hope that you too will stand with Amazon to secure a future of equal pay for equal value and equal exposure, where the best writing bubbles to the top because of its quality and not its marketing budget, and where authors are paid on the weight of their words and not because they were lucky enough to make it out of slush pile or by some lighting strike of nepotism.
Posted on: Sun, 10 Aug 2014 12:35:09 +0000
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