Sara Nelson, Editor-in-Chief of Publishers Weekly, responds recently (10/13/2008) to a call that authors need to boycott our latest big-bad-big-business wolf: Amazon.com.
Perhaps my experience with Amazon belongs to a different world, but I have nothing but good things to say about what they have done for the publishing world and particularly for small publishing companies and small-time authors. Sure, they’re big. Sure, they demand large discounts. But it’s worth every penny we don’t make: having your book on Amazon.com is quite possibly the cheapest marketing tool you can use.
Nelson writes,
Obviously, it’s true that Amazon poses a real danger, and not just to independent booksellers who are finding it harder and harder to make their numbers work in the face of Amazon’s economies of scale. Publishers both large and small are often caught in its economic stranglehold—there are reports from abroad that Amazon threatened not to list certain new titles because publishers wouldn’t meet their terms—and many fear, perhaps rightly, that it’s just a matter of time until Amazon controls what gets published. But indie bookstores have contributed to the problem, too: by not stocking “small†titles, by “small†authors or publishers, by limiting readings and signings to “big names†and so on, according to many.
While there’s a lot of truth in that, I would like to say that people who decry Amazon.com and Wal-Mart for stifling the marketplace are little more than fearmongers. For one, they live and write and scream as if God doesn’t lovingly and Providentially look out for the world He created. (And yes, believe it or not, that world includes authors, too!)
For two, they forget that human history is riddled with examples of innovative people who burst through the “chains” of the “big bad wolfs.” Amazon happens to be one of them. (Ask any older bookseller what it was like to have Barnes & Noble take over the bookselling business 10-15 years ago.) To worry that “it’s just a matter of time until Amazon controls what gets published” is absolutely ridiculous. If anything, I think that such talk is a result of mere envy. Amazon is doing a lot of things right, and there are a lot of sulkers around who don’t like it one bit.