A few words on J.B. Dickey ...

Earlier today, it seems a dust-up occurred with a Seattle-area Mystery Boookstore and Amazon Publishing. The bookstore openly refused to do business with Amazon Publishing, allow their authors to give signings or even sell their books.


As an Amazon author, I understand the man's sentiment, even though it's misplaced. I, too, also ran a bookstore years ago in Los Angeles and I fully understand the nature of the business. Independent bookstores though do not break or thrive based upon Amazon, their imprints or their authors. Amazon is also NOT the piano wire of modern publishing as the gentleman would like to assert.

The traditional publishing houses, the big 6 as they've collectively been titled, have done more damage to the industry over the last several decades than Amazon has in the 17 years they've been in business and emerging as the largest and strongest competitor. Reinventing something is never looked at with a smile. It's also interesting that they're the most "author-friendly" in the business, even while others would like the public to believe otherwise.

When I recently attended BEA in NY, I heard some incredibly egregious and off-coloured remarks about Amazon and all of them were either sad, bitter and wrong or just dead wrong. A few people actually publicly made fools of themselves in front of large groups of people at the convention trying to assert that kind of ad hominem rhetoric. Mr. Dickey is just expressing publicly what certain people have been saying behind closed doors for some time, and there's really no mystery in that at all.

I think most of us have known that this issue was going to become more heated in time. If that's sooner rather than later, I would just advise folks to be thoughtful and not assume that everything people are yelling with the tone of terror, is necessarily accurate.