For a little while now, I've been trying to up my game when it comes…
How Much Do You, As A Reader, Care About the Amazon/Hatchette BrouHaHa?
It seems like my feed reader and twitter has been full of articles on the Amazon/Hatchette brouhaha the past few days. I suspect that’s largely because I subscribe to a lot of writer-related blogs. But I wonder how much readers even care.
To summarize (and probably grossly understate the issue), Amazon and Hatchette are at odds about eBook pricing for the retailer. You can read an opinion on just about every side of the issue, and it’ll likely be by a big name you recognize, if you care to take the time to poke about the Internet. Big name authors are mad at Amazon. Other big name authors are mad at Hatchette. Basically, there doesn’t seem to be a clear “right” side to the issue – it depends on your perspective and your vested interest.
Aside from the few impacts you might have noticed if you’ve attempted to order (or pre-order) a book published by Hatchette (orders take longer to be fulfilled, pre-order buttons are missing), has this even been on your radar? I’m thinking it’s unlikely I would have noticed (or cared) before I was published. And yet, that seems to be the tone of the articles I’m starting to see now – the authors of these blog posts are urging readers to care, to get mad, to say Amazon’s being a big bully. And that seems odd to me, because I just can’t figure out why a reader without any other tie to the publishing world would care one way or the other beyond just wanting to get whatever book they want in the timeframe Amazon has conditioned them to expect.
So…do you, as a reader, care?
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The part that concerns me is amazon demanding a bigger percentage of retail price
I do care. Chip MacGregor did a few blog posts on it and he was adamant to point out that without Hatchette Amazon is ever so close to being a monopoly. If that happens, cuts on already small royalties and contracts that limit the writer even more will become a major injury to the writers. I think Amazon is wrong to withhold sales and pre-orders of Hatchette’s products at this time.
I get that – and as a writer it bothers me. But when I put my reader hat on…I have trouble seeing why I care (which is, I think, part of the problem in general.) Sure, I want writers to be paid – but I also want cheap books and somewhat like other jobs, it’s not so much my problem if your choice of career isn’t one that pays well. (That’s a harsher version of how I feel, but I think it’s closer to the prevalent thought process.) I can by Hatchette books elsewhere if I care about something specific that much, or just find something else to buy.
I do think now that they’re trying to strong arm Warner Brothers movies in the same way that you might see consumers getting more concerned/interested though.