James Hynes

Ever since last Friday, anybody who has anything to do with book publishing has been riveted by the clash of the titans between Amazon and Macmillan, as they duke it out like Godzilla vs. Mothra far above the heads of readers and writers over the pricing of e-books. If you don't know what's going on, the best account so far is Laura Miller's in Salon this morning, along with Sarah Weinman's more business-oriented account at DailyFinance. The short version: Amazon wants to keep the price of Kindle titles at $9.99, Macmillan and most other book publishers want to able to set their own prices, and while they battle it out, Amazon has removed the "buy" button from all Macmillan titles on their website. You can still go through Amazon to buy Macmillan titles from their associated sellers, but you can't buy any of their titles, either the Kindle or the paper versions, directly from Amazon. 

Here's how clueless I am: for the first 24-hours, I was interested in a general way, as a (very, very, very minor) member of the publishing industry, and it wasn't until Saturday night that I realized, with a sinking feeling, that hey, I'm a Macmillan author. Either I'd never known it, or had known it and forgotten, but St. Martin's/Picador, which is the publisher of four of my five books, is owned by Macmillan (which in turn is owned by the German publishing conglomerate Holtzbrinck), which makes me perforce a Macmillan author. As soon as I realized this, I zipped over to Amazon, and true enough, none of the titles I currently have in print had an Amazon "buy" button, only a button that would send you somewhere else, where you can buy a used copy of The Lecturer's Tale for a penny. It was only at that moment that, in the immortal words of Martin Lawrence in Bad Boys, shit just got real.

Like a lot of writers, I'm more or less siding with Macmillan, but with mixed feelings. The pricing of all books, not just Kindle editions, is a vexed issue for every writer I know, because every writer I know is also a serious reader and, for the most part, a serious buyer of books. On the one hand, like every writer I know, my heart sinks a bit when someone asks me to sign a copy of one of my books that they obviously bought used (which means I didn't make a dime off it, let alone a penny). One lovely elderly woman in my neighborhood regularly tells me, every time I run into her while she's walking her dog, what a fan she is of Kings of Infinite Space, and how she bought a copy at Half-Price Books and passed it around to fifteen friends of hers. Like I say, mixed feelings: fifteen people read my book, but none of them paid for it, and the one who did, didn't earn me any royalties. But on the other hand, I buy used books all the time, usually at the aforementioned Half-Price Books here in Austin. In fact, I buy used books much more often than I buy new ones—not to mention that I regularly take books out of the library, which likewise earns each author I read exactly nothing. All of which is to say that, as a book buyer with a limited budget, I like a bargain as much as the next guy.

The mixed feelings I have about this are only rivalled by the mixed feelings I have when I read my semi-annual royalty statements. These are notoriously impenetrable, written in the bookkeeper's equivalent of Linear B. (I once complained to my agent that I couldn't make any sense of my latest statement, and he said, "Well, you're not supposed to.") But one thing I have divined from my statements—along with the realization that I need to keep my day job—is that the steeper the discount given to a retailer, the smaller my royalties are. And since Amazon is basically the Wal-Mart of the Internet, demanding, and getting, huge discounts from its suppliers (i.e., publishers), the percentage I make off of each copy I sell through Amazon is appreciably smaller than the percentage I make off of books sold elsewhere. (Though this isn't unique to Amazon: Borders and Barnes and Noble can also command huge discounts, which means basically the only books I make full royalties off of are ones sold by independent booksellers.) Now, if I were Stephen King or John Grisham, this wouldn't matter so much, since what I'd make up in volume would more than offset what I lose per individual book. But most of us aren't King or Grisham, so it stings a little to see our royalties (such as they are) shrink even more to accomodate a powerful retailer. I'm not going to compare myself to a sweatshop worker in Singapore, whose wages are kept low by Wal-Mart's insistence on low prices for running shoes or sweatshirts, except maybe I am, just a little bit: the aggressive push for discounts and low prices by retailers has its harshest effect not on publishers, per se, but on the people who actually, you know, make the goods. Which is why it matters to me that Amazon wants to encourage book buyers to get used to the $9.99 Kindle edition, or even $9.99 hardcovers. It's money out of my pocket.

But then, on the other hand (and in this argument, I have more hands than the goddess Kali), even if they boost the price of e-books to $14.99 (at least for new books), and even if every one of those fifteen freeloading readers of Kings of Infinite Space bought a new copy at full price at an indie bookseller, I still wouldn't make that much money. Full price books sell fewer copies, and I ought to know, because I can't remember the last time I bought a new book at list price. The fact remains that no matter who wins this dispute over e-book pricing (and book pricing in general), the vast majority of fiction writers still won't be able to make a living off of writing books.

In the meantime, I guess I'm still mainly siding with Macmillan. The fact that Amazon has been acting like a 19th century mill owner, locking out obstreperous workers, only encourages me to side with the other international conglomerate in this fight. But, the fact is, I'm not even sure how much this is my fight, for all the reasons I've enumerated above. As Laura points out in her article, this is more an argument about technology than it is about reading or literature; it's one of those epic struggles between big media companies that has happened many times before (see the early history of television, or the history of the movie business, or for that matter the effect of publishing technology on the rise of the novel in the 19th century), and which affects the lives of artists without much taking into account their interests or desires. I have a vital interest in how all this turns out, but at the moment, I mainly feel like collateral damage.