Why the Hachette vs Amazon Fight is Both Good and Terrible
A little housekeeping before we get started. I did two interviews last week, one where I interviewed Elizabeth Moon for Orbit (SQUEEE) (Here's where she interviewed me), and another really fun interview where I talked Devi (as well as hints of future Paradox books) with Not Yet Read. I had a blast with all of these, and I hope you enjoy them! Thank you to Orbit and Tabitha at Not Yet Read for having me!
Now, on to the controversy of the day.
As I'm sure many of you have already heard, Hachette Books, the behemoth international parent company of my own publisher, Orbit, is currently engaged in a very nasty round of negotiations with Amazon, the largest bookseller in the world. I, of course, am not privy to the substance of such high level power plays between corporate giants, but considering the entire reason Amazon and Hachette are at the table now is to renegotiate ebook pricing models after the US Department of Justice slammed Apple and the world's five largest publishers for colluding to fix ebook prices in 2012, it's not a big jump to guess that how much ebooks should cost, and who controls that price--the publisher or the bookseller--are the main bones of contention.
This is not a new fight. Amazon and publishers have been going around this same ring since ebooks were invented, and it probably won't be settled any time soon. With more and more of the world moving to ebooks as their primary book buying venue, the quarrel over who controls the prices for that market will only get dirtier and more contentious. What really has people up in arms this time around, however, is that Amazon, in an effort to flex their mercantile muscles at Hachette, has delayed the the shipment of paper copies of Hachette's new releases, and is now removing pre-order buttons from certain unreleased Hachette titles, thus effectively preventing those books from gathering any pre-release sales.
This is a pretty big deal. Though technically not a monopoly due to other booksellers like Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, and even Wallmart (plus indie shops and many other large, non-American chains), Amazon is hands down the biggest online seller, bigger than next dozen internet retailers combined. If they decide not to sell your stuff, then for all practical purposes, it ain't getting sold. Amazon knows this, and right now, they're using that enormous market power to squeeze Hachette into accepting their terms.
Some, like my fellow Orbit author Lilith Saintcrow, have called this type of behavior evil. Amazon supporters like Joe Konrath call it capitalism working exactly as it should. Personally, I think it's both. After all, the entire point of capitalism is to be more ruthless, clever, and efficient than the other guy. It's a system where the strong eat and the weak are meat, and, for the most part, I have no problem with that as it applies to the book industry. Modern publishing is a cobbled together mess of old, outdated business practices and assumptions. It needs to be shaken up, have a few bites taken out of it, before it collapses under its own ponderous weight. My problem with this fracas comes from where, and more importantly, whom Amazon decided to bite.
If you want to know just how much losing a preorder button hurts, consider the debut author. Imagine the following scenario: after years of rejection, you sell a series to a publisher. Hooray! Now, after a year and a half of edits, copy edits, cover designs, and so forth, your book is finally launching in July of 2014. You're racing around to get ready, doing blog posts and trying your best to get the word out. The marketing dollars your publisher has put into launching your book are in full swing--books are going out to reviewers, your cover is being featured on their site and twitter feed, and you're starting to see real buzz about your writing for the first time...and then, due to a dispute so far above anyone involved in your book, Amazon removes the pre-order button from your book's page.
Now, all that buzz you worked so hard to generate, the interest your publisher's marketing dollars bought, has nowhere to go. You can try to point people to other places to preorder your book--other stores, indies, all that good stuff--but you're not even published yet. Most people have no idea who you are. And those potential readers, the ones who read a good review of your book (on that same review site where your publisher sent your book as part of their pre-release promo) and decide to go check it out? They'll click over to Amazon and find no preorder button. Some, of course, will go to another site or call their local bookstore order that way, but most will decide not to bother. They'll go on about their lives and forget all about your book, and you'll never even know about them because no one but Amazon can track how many people visit a book's page and don't buy.
For an author trying to get their first foothold, this is a death knell. An under-performing debut can ruin an author's career before it begins. This is the real fallout of Amazon's tactics--not the publisher or the big sellers or even the midlist authors like myself who already have dedicated readers, but the new writers. People who are just starting their first series, or who only have one or two books out. These are the most fragile members of the traditional publishing ecosystem, the ones who can't easily weather this sort of disruption, and they're the ones whose careers will ultimately pay while all of this shakes out.
The most obvious solution to this of course would be to just get out of this all together and self-publish, but the authors this is happening to signed those publishing contracts two years ago. Even if they did decided to say screw it all and go publish their next work on their own, that doesn't save the book that's losing sales right now. Also, as I've already talked about, not everyone wants to self publish. That is their choice, and it is just plain awful that those authors who did everything right according to their publishing choice are getting bashed around by giant powers they have no control over. And yeah, I realize getting stepped on by massive forces you can't control is life, but we're not talking about tornadoes here. Tornadoes are unfeeling natural phenomenons. Companies, on the other hand, are made up of people. You can bet your bottom dollar that someone at Amazon, probably a lot of someones, knew exactly what their decision to employ these sort of tactics on Hachette would mean for these authors, but they did it anyway. They made the decision to be ruthless. That's capitalism, but it's also cruel and needlessly harmful to the very authors who write the books Amazon and Hachette are fighting over.
Long story short: I don't object to Amazon strong arming publishers. I actually think we'll end up with a better, more efficient ebook market once all of this shakes out. What I object to are the callous tactics being employed. There's always a choice in these things, and Amazon's decision to use Hachette's authors as hostages in their negotiations says a lot about them, most of it not good. We'll never know exactly how many sales were lost in all of this. It very well might be that I'm making a mountain out of a molehill, or it could be enormous, we simply can't know. But I stand firm on my belief while capitalism can and has done great things, it does not excuse bad behavior wholesale.
Just as freedom of speech does not mean freedom from criticism, good business decisions do not mean freedom from morality. I can't and wouldn't want to keep Amazon from doing business, but I can stand up and call it out when I think it's gone too far. This is the natural push and pull of society. And who knows? Maybe if we all make enough of a stink about it, even a giant like Amazon will think twice before pulling a stunt like this again.
Now, on to the controversy of the day.
As I'm sure many of you have already heard, Hachette Books, the behemoth international parent company of my own publisher, Orbit, is currently engaged in a very nasty round of negotiations with Amazon, the largest bookseller in the world. I, of course, am not privy to the substance of such high level power plays between corporate giants, but considering the entire reason Amazon and Hachette are at the table now is to renegotiate ebook pricing models after the US Department of Justice slammed Apple and the world's five largest publishers for colluding to fix ebook prices in 2012, it's not a big jump to guess that how much ebooks should cost, and who controls that price--the publisher or the bookseller--are the main bones of contention.
This is not a new fight. Amazon and publishers have been going around this same ring since ebooks were invented, and it probably won't be settled any time soon. With more and more of the world moving to ebooks as their primary book buying venue, the quarrel over who controls the prices for that market will only get dirtier and more contentious. What really has people up in arms this time around, however, is that Amazon, in an effort to flex their mercantile muscles at Hachette, has delayed the the shipment of paper copies of Hachette's new releases, and is now removing pre-order buttons from certain unreleased Hachette titles, thus effectively preventing those books from gathering any pre-release sales.
This is a pretty big deal. Though technically not a monopoly due to other booksellers like Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, and even Wallmart (plus indie shops and many other large, non-American chains), Amazon is hands down the biggest online seller, bigger than next dozen internet retailers combined. If they decide not to sell your stuff, then for all practical purposes, it ain't getting sold. Amazon knows this, and right now, they're using that enormous market power to squeeze Hachette into accepting their terms.
Some, like my fellow Orbit author Lilith Saintcrow, have called this type of behavior evil. Amazon supporters like Joe Konrath call it capitalism working exactly as it should. Personally, I think it's both. After all, the entire point of capitalism is to be more ruthless, clever, and efficient than the other guy. It's a system where the strong eat and the weak are meat, and, for the most part, I have no problem with that as it applies to the book industry. Modern publishing is a cobbled together mess of old, outdated business practices and assumptions. It needs to be shaken up, have a few bites taken out of it, before it collapses under its own ponderous weight. My problem with this fracas comes from where, and more importantly, whom Amazon decided to bite.
If you want to know just how much losing a preorder button hurts, consider the debut author. Imagine the following scenario: after years of rejection, you sell a series to a publisher. Hooray! Now, after a year and a half of edits, copy edits, cover designs, and so forth, your book is finally launching in July of 2014. You're racing around to get ready, doing blog posts and trying your best to get the word out. The marketing dollars your publisher has put into launching your book are in full swing--books are going out to reviewers, your cover is being featured on their site and twitter feed, and you're starting to see real buzz about your writing for the first time...and then, due to a dispute so far above anyone involved in your book, Amazon removes the pre-order button from your book's page.
Now, all that buzz you worked so hard to generate, the interest your publisher's marketing dollars bought, has nowhere to go. You can try to point people to other places to preorder your book--other stores, indies, all that good stuff--but you're not even published yet. Most people have no idea who you are. And those potential readers, the ones who read a good review of your book (on that same review site where your publisher sent your book as part of their pre-release promo) and decide to go check it out? They'll click over to Amazon and find no preorder button. Some, of course, will go to another site or call their local bookstore order that way, but most will decide not to bother. They'll go on about their lives and forget all about your book, and you'll never even know about them because no one but Amazon can track how many people visit a book's page and don't buy.
For an author trying to get their first foothold, this is a death knell. An under-performing debut can ruin an author's career before it begins. This is the real fallout of Amazon's tactics--not the publisher or the big sellers or even the midlist authors like myself who already have dedicated readers, but the new writers. People who are just starting their first series, or who only have one or two books out. These are the most fragile members of the traditional publishing ecosystem, the ones who can't easily weather this sort of disruption, and they're the ones whose careers will ultimately pay while all of this shakes out.
The most obvious solution to this of course would be to just get out of this all together and self-publish, but the authors this is happening to signed those publishing contracts two years ago. Even if they did decided to say screw it all and go publish their next work on their own, that doesn't save the book that's losing sales right now. Also, as I've already talked about, not everyone wants to self publish. That is their choice, and it is just plain awful that those authors who did everything right according to their publishing choice are getting bashed around by giant powers they have no control over. And yeah, I realize getting stepped on by massive forces you can't control is life, but we're not talking about tornadoes here. Tornadoes are unfeeling natural phenomenons. Companies, on the other hand, are made up of people. You can bet your bottom dollar that someone at Amazon, probably a lot of someones, knew exactly what their decision to employ these sort of tactics on Hachette would mean for these authors, but they did it anyway. They made the decision to be ruthless. That's capitalism, but it's also cruel and needlessly harmful to the very authors who write the books Amazon and Hachette are fighting over.
Long story short: I don't object to Amazon strong arming publishers. I actually think we'll end up with a better, more efficient ebook market once all of this shakes out. What I object to are the callous tactics being employed. There's always a choice in these things, and Amazon's decision to use Hachette's authors as hostages in their negotiations says a lot about them, most of it not good. We'll never know exactly how many sales were lost in all of this. It very well might be that I'm making a mountain out of a molehill, or it could be enormous, we simply can't know. But I stand firm on my belief while capitalism can and has done great things, it does not excuse bad behavior wholesale.
Just as freedom of speech does not mean freedom from criticism, good business decisions do not mean freedom from morality. I can't and wouldn't want to keep Amazon from doing business, but I can stand up and call it out when I think it's gone too far. This is the natural push and pull of society. And who knows? Maybe if we all make enough of a stink about it, even a giant like Amazon will think twice before pulling a stunt like this again.
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