The Argument for Amazon, from an Author

I know this will be unpopular, but some facts are worth thinking about

Okay, so I know everyone hates Amazon right now—more precisely, everyone hates Jeff Bezos right now—and I totally get that. We all fear monopolies and we hate to think of a billionaire putting bookstores out of business. But there is another side to the “Amazon is pure evil” story, and that’s what I’m going to write about today. The 800-pound gorilla, as it were.

As many of you know, I worked with award-winning small press Sunbelt Publications of San Diego for over a decade, ending up as their Editor-In-Chief; I left in 2011 to become a freelance editor and I am currently their Editor at Large which is way more fun than working in an office. My work for them is a labor of love, so I charge them for editing jobs at the same rate I use for non-profits; Sunbelt, being an independent regional publisher and book distributor, is always struggling to survive.

A big part of that is because the business model for the publishing industry is crazy: publishing and distributing books is the only business where you get to return product and get your money back. And that is what indie booksellers do, month after month. Industry experts estimate that between 25% and 50% of books that were ordered by bookstores get returned. Why not? Book not selling like hotcakes, return them for a full refund! Do you owe money to this publisher? Returns some books and immediately convert that debt to a cash balance. And who suffers? The distributor, the publisher, and the author. And who wins? The bookstore does.

Guess who returns the least amount of books to publishers? Amazon. Guess who sells the most books every year? Amazon. Guess who sells the majority of self-published books? Yep, Amazon. And they pay publishers monthly, not whenever they feel like it, or whenever they need a shipment of new books from said publisher. remember, my book is published by Re:books of Toronto, so I am not talking about me making money. I didn’t finance the publication of my book but I did pay to record the audiobook and to do hundreds of hours of marketing, plus spending money on lots of fun marketing things. Bottom line: the likelihood of me ever making a profit from the author portion of my publisher’s book sales is as likely as me hitting the California Lottery. Zero.

Now, back to bookstores: I love them, especially indie bookstores, and I support them big-time and have for many years. When I lived in NYC I bought at least a book a week for over 7 years (that’s the sort of spendthrift lifestyle that comes from living on cash tips). Same when I was living in San Diego and working for Sunbelt and going to bookstores every single week to promote our books and authors. A great way to make friends with a bookstore owner is to buy a book from them. I bought a lot of books.

Funny enough, when my memoir came out last year, I contacted every one of the surviving bookstores I used to frequent in San Diego—and all over Southern California. I did the same when I was up in the PNW. I probably pitched thirty bookstores. Guess how many bookstores agreed to host a book-signing for me? Not one. I eventually got one book store, La Playa Books in Point Loma to do a signing event with me, mostly because I was recommended by a friend of mine, author Jill Hall, and they’d been working with Sunbelt for years. The event was great—we sold a lot of books and brought in new people to their store, through all the free advertising I did in local media. The store sent the rest of the books back to Sunbelt that week.

The manager of Small World Books in Venice also agreed to host a signing, if I would bring him books to sell that night and only charge him for the books I sold, even though the store could have gotten them from Ingram or Sunbelt, both well-known distributors. The staff was pleasantly surprised by my enthusiastic crowd and book sales, so they kept a few extra to sell (they may be there still!).

So, why didn’t bookstores want me and my very well reviewed book? Because, even though they knew me, their customers don’t know my name. They only want to host events with authors who have name recognition. But of course, name recognition comes from up-and-coming authors doing events, among other things. The whole set up is a classic Catch-22. Big authors get lots of events in big and little bookstores. Unknown authors get nothing much, except what they can coerce from the staff in their own local store.

Late in 1999, when I started out with Sunbelt, the book world was changing. Crown Books had died out, and chains like Waldenbooks and Borders Books were falling on hard times and would soon go the way of the Dodo. Back then those stores—and virtually every small indie bookstore—took chances on new authors and welcomed events in their stores; basically they were open to whatever we could bring to their customers. Talks, slideshows, author panels, even cooking demos for the cookbooks we published and distributed. Barnes & Noble was harder to pitch, but we could at least get a couple of copies of our new books in the local stores. All of that is almost impossible now. After 20 years of working with B&N in the SoCal area, which I wrote about in Honeymoon at Sea, not one of those stores bought even one copy of my book.

And I am not an outlier in this respect. Most of the indie authors I know—whether they are published by a small press like me, or they publish their own high-quality books—cannot place more than a handful of books for sale in a brick-and-mortar bookstore. And when you do place books for sale in an indie bookstore, you either have to sell them on commission, or be willing to take back dozens of books if they don’t sell by some randomly chosen date (perhaps when their rent is due). Luckily, I get lots of publicity due to the amount of interviews and essays I publish online, and my reviews are stellar, so my ebook keeps on selling (yes, on Amazon).

Once again, I love bookstores and I am so very glad they exist—along with libraries, bookstores are the one physical place in the modern world where actual literature is celebrated and even adored. They are gathering places, welcoming community spaces, and salons for intelligent offerings of thoughtful conversation (with name authors). I will never stop supporting my favorite bookstores, and on my travels I find new ones to support and promote each and every year.

But they are no longer places where new and aspiring authors get equal exposure and equal pay. They are no longer places where unknown books get pushed alongside bestsellers. Most bookstores no longer even shelve titles that are not already on a bestseller list of some kind, unless they come with advertising money from one of the big 5 publishers. They’re no longer willing to take a chance on stocking copies by new voices (and don’t even get me started on how timid the big 5 publishers are to take chances on new writers or unusual stories!)

So, knowing all of this, why is Amazon always presented as the bad guy in publishing? Most booksellers who vanished during the 2000-2005 chain store bloodbath did so because they were overextended or underfunded or way out of touch with their communities (and sometimes they lost their space due to greedy landlords, which happens all the time now, too). And many wonderful indie bookstores thrive to this day, with the avid support of a vibrant community of readers and authors—and booksellers who work really hard. It is hard to keep a bookstore afloat, but that’s true for restaurants, too, but we don’t boycott Applebees, Chilies, and Olive Garden.

Amazon is uniquely positioned to help independent book publishers make a living, something I would hazard to guess that most indie publishers couldn’t do without Amazon! They pay publishers every month for the books they have sold, which really helps publishers pay the rent and keep the lights on, while they wait for the returns to come in and then bill the invoice once more and hope they get paid. They don’t always. True story: one bookstore in San Diego never even pays most of their small publishers after a bookstore event, reckoning they will never have to buy from that source again. That stinks, but they can get away with doing it, because authors want their books in stores.

So, the next time you hear that Amazon has been the death of the book-selling business, remember that there are plenty of narratives behind that simple story. I personally know of three small publishers who are in business solely due to sales from Amazon—their books are no longer carried by any bookstores, and they can’t afford to buy the very expensive book ads in magazines or on social media. But people love the authors’ books, and want to buy them, and they know just where to find them.

I want to add that Amazon absolutely needs to up its game as far as working fairly with all small businesses, and respecting their warehouse employees and allowing them to unionize. But I just don’t think eliminating Amazon is the answer to all of life’s economic ills. And it would be a major blow to indie publishing and to the highly democratic system of self-publishing, where what is good sells and what isn’t good, doesn’t. If the company goes away, it won’t solve all our problems, and it will create another one, a huge job loss. After all, Jeff Bezos doesn’t just sell 300 print books annually, and a lot more ebooks—he employs over 1.5 million people worldwide.

And as much as I hate that Bezos prevented the Washington Post from endorsing Kamala Harris, no one who reads that newspaper had any doubt exactly who and what the other guy is, and what he isn’t, due to some brilliant reporting work from journalists at the Post (and other top newspapers and media outlets) over the years.

Overall, I am much more concerned about the fact that a majority of Americans do not read books at all, rather than worrying about where readers buy those precious paperbacks.

Go ahead and give me your dissenting opinions below, I expect that I’ll get some abuse for this, along the lines of “siding with the enemy” and the like. Bring it on in the comments, but of course, be respectful. Thanks for reading—see you next Friday!

hasta pronto!