JOIN USLiterary lions unite against Amazon
The authors are uniting. Last spring, when Amazon began discouraging customers from buying books published by Hachette, the writers grumbled that they were pawns in the retailer’s contract negotiations over e-book prices. During the summer, they banded together and publicly protested Amazon’s actions.
Now, hundreds of other writers, including some of the world’s most distinguished, are joining the coalition. Few, if any, are published by Hachette. And they have goals far broader than freeing up the Hachette titles. They want the US Justice Department to investigate Amazon for illegal monopoly tactics.
They also want to highlight the issue being debated endlessly and furiously on writers’ blogs: What are the rights and responsibilities of a company that sells half the books in America and controls the dominant e-book platform?
Andrew Wylie, whose client roster of heavyweights in literature is probably longer than that of any other literary agent, said he was asking all his writers whether they wanted to join the group, Authors United. Among those who have said yes, Wylie said are Booker prize winner Philip Roth, Orhan Pamuk, Salman Rushdie, V S Naipaul and Milan Kundera.
“It’s very clear to me, and to those I represent, that what Amazon is doing is very detrimental to the publishing industry and the interests of authors,” the agent said. “If Amazon is not stopped, we are facing the end of literary culture in America.”
Amazon declined to comment for this article. But in an interview in July, Russ Grandinetti, the company’s vice president for Kindle, said: “Books are really home for us. That’s where we started. We care deeply about them. Helping books and authors succeed in a crowded world of digital media is very important to us.”
Even Amazon’s detractors readily admit that it is one of the most powerful tools for selling books since the Gutenberg press. But how that power is used is increasingly being questioned in a way it was not during the company’s rise.
Take, for instance, the different treatment Amazon has given two new Hachette books on political themes. “Sons of Wichita” by Daniel Schulman, a writer for Mother Jones magazine, came out in May. Amazon initially discounted the book, a well-received biography of the conservative Koch brothers, by 10 per cent, according to a price-tracking service. Now it does not discount it at all. It takes as long as three weeks to ship.
“The Way Forward: Renewing the American Idea” by Representative Paul Ryan has no such constraints, an unusual position these days for a new Hachette book. Amazon refused to take advance orders for “The Way Forward,” as it does with all new Hachette titles. But once the book was on sale, it was consistently discounted by about 25 per cent. There is no shipping delay. Not surprisingly, it has a much higher sales ranking on Amazon than “Sons of Wichita.”
An Amazon spokesman declined to explain why “The Way Forward” was getting special treatment. A spokesman for Ryan, the 2012 Republican nominee for vice president, declined to comment. A spokeswoman for Hachette declined to comment.
A recent sign-up to Authors United who is not a Wylie client is Ursula K Le Guin, the recipient of the 2014 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, given by the National Book Foundation during its annual awards ceremony in November.
Le Guin, author of “The Left Hand of Darkness,” the Earthsea series and other award-winning works, will be presented her medal by Neil Gaiman, a regular attendee at the all-expenses-paid Campfire weekend for writers hosted by Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive. She has strong feelings about the Amazon-Hachette dispute.
“We’re talking about censorship: deliberately making a book hard or impossible to get, ‘disappearing’ an author,” Le Guin said. “Governments use censorship for moral and political ends, justifiable or not. Amazon is using censorship to gain total market control so that they can dictate to publishers what they can publish, to authors what they can write, to readers what they can buy. This is more than unjustifiable, it is intolerable.”
The Wylie Agency has about a thousand clients. Many have not yet responded to his query about Authors United, because they are travelling or are inattentive to email. But about 300 Wylie writers have signed on, as well as the estates of Saul Bellow, Roberto Bolaño, Joseph Brodsky, William Burroughs, John Cheever, Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller and Hunter S Thompson. “Every single response without exception has been positive,” Wylie said.
Authors United, spearheaded by the thriller writer Douglas Preston, is in the midst of two efforts — writing members of the Amazon board individually in the hope that they will sway Bezos to take Hachette books out of the line of fire while negotiations continue, and drafting a letter to the Justice Department asking it to examine Amazon for possible anti-trust violations.
Affordable for all
Any threat presented by these initiatives does not seem to have weakened Amazon’s resolve. The retailer has said it was trying to make e-books cheaper and thus more affordable for all, and that publishers and writers would make up in volume what they were losing in margin if the prices were lower.
Confronting Hachette and its authors might incur some short-term public relations damage for Amazon. But if Wall Street feels that the suppliers have the upper hand, that could damage Amazon in a more vulnerable place: its stock market valuation. Amazon shares are underperforming the market this year, but its valuation is still sky-high.
In a letter that Preston sent to members of Authors United, he wrote: “I had hoped our efforts would have resulted in some gesture from Amazon, which is well aware of the damage it is doing to the careers of several thousand authors. Instead, we have been met with disparagement.”
The letter to the Justice Department is being written by Barry C Lynn, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and author of “Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction.”
Whether a viable case could be mounted against Amazon is a matter of debate among antitrust scholars. An earlier effort by Hachette to interest government regulators in a case did not go anywhere. Amazon had better luck. In 2010, it sent a letter to the Justice Department outlining a possible anti-trust case against Apple and five major publishers that suggested they had colluded to raise e-book prices. How much that influenced the government is unknown, but the case became a reality.
The publishers, including Hachette, denied collusion but settled the case, saying they could not afford to defend it. Apple lost in court. That acrimonious past hangs heavily over the New York publishing community. Few major editors or agents have spoken publicly about the latest dispute.
“Everyone is scared to death of being accused of something,” Wylie said. “It’s impossible for two publishers to have lunch without a lawyer being present.”