The only way is ethics - by Nicola Morgan
As authors who publish our own ebooks, how do we deal with the ethical issue of having to direct our readers to Amazon (etc) rather than physical bookshops? Obviously, we don't have a choice with our ebooks if they don't have physical versions, but I still think there's an issue, because if we end up writing more and more of our own ebook-only books and fewer and fewer books for trade publishers, then we are in effect shifting our business model away from supporting the traditional book-selling industry. Now, I sometimes hear indie-only writers sounding rather gleeful or at least careless about that prospect but I hold no truck with that glee or carelessness.
I do know that some independent bookshops feel worried and even a little bit hostile to us when we choose to self-publish in e-format. I would hope that they understand that authors are struggling financially too and that we need to do what we can to earn a living. But doing what we can to earn a living might hurt someone else. Even, ultimately, ourselves.
I wholeheartedly believe that writers - published and self-publishing - need to support physical bookshops. And libraries. We need to do this if for no other reason (and there are other reasons) than that bookshops and libraries feed the reading needs of children and without reading children we will have no reading adults. I call bookshops and libraries the mothership for writers and anyone who loves books cannot possibly celebrate or call for their demise. And I know none of my fellow Electric Authors do.
Yet bookshops, particularly indies, are unable (at the moment - and yes, I know there are plans afoot but the plans may not be enough) to sell our ebooks. So we have to use their big hungrypredator rival, Amazon, instead. Or one of the other e-stores, if we're happy to sell fewer books.
Another ethical problem is Amazon Associates. As you know, anyone can become an Amazon Associate. If you do the technical bit properly, any time someone clicks through to Amazon from the special link on your website or blog and buys a book - any book, or indeed any product - you get a little commission.
So I have. In fact, I've set up an A-store. But I feel bad about this. Because I love physical bookshops and I do all my own physical book buying from them. But I need the income, because my income from my physical books is so paltry.
So, I have a little solution to my ethical tangle. On my website and blog I give the following message:
Actually, you know what? I still feel bad. Damn ethics. I am now contemplating removing my Amazon store and losing even that little bit of income... In fact, I'm going to call for a vote. Please everyone leave your honest comment below: should I remove my Associates link or to carry on as above?
PS I apologise enormously for the title of this post. I couldn't resist.
Nicola Morgan is the author of books for teenagers and children, most of which (the books, not the teenagers etc) are available in physical bookshops and on the internet. Her latest books are Write to be Published and Tweet Right - The Sensible Person's Guide to Twitter, which is only available as an ebook. Her Amazon store is here!
I do know that some independent bookshops feel worried and even a little bit hostile to us when we choose to self-publish in e-format. I would hope that they understand that authors are struggling financially too and that we need to do what we can to earn a living. But doing what we can to earn a living might hurt someone else. Even, ultimately, ourselves.
I wholeheartedly believe that writers - published and self-publishing - need to support physical bookshops. And libraries. We need to do this if for no other reason (and there are other reasons) than that bookshops and libraries feed the reading needs of children and without reading children we will have no reading adults. I call bookshops and libraries the mothership for writers and anyone who loves books cannot possibly celebrate or call for their demise. And I know none of my fellow Electric Authors do.
Yet bookshops, particularly indies, are unable (at the moment - and yes, I know there are plans afoot but the plans may not be enough) to sell our ebooks. So we have to use their big hungry
Another ethical problem is Amazon Associates. As you know, anyone can become an Amazon Associate. If you do the technical bit properly, any time someone clicks through to Amazon from the special link on your website or blog and buys a book - any book, or indeed any product - you get a little commission.
So I have. In fact, I've set up an A-store. But I feel bad about this. Because I love physical bookshops and I do all my own physical book buying from them. But I need the income, because my income from my physical books is so paltry.
So, I have a little solution to my ethical tangle. On my website and blog I give the following message:
- I don't mind where you buy my books - I'm just happy when you do.
- I personally buy from physical bookshops because I believe in their importance and their fabulousness.
- But if you, for whatever reason, prefer or wish or need or choose to use Amazon, please do so from my own Amazon store (or from the Amazon store of whatever writer you want to support).
- And if you buy from Amazon through my store, I promise to spend ALL the commission I get in a physical bookshop. My choices in Edinburgh will be the Edinburgh Bookshop, Blackwells and Waterstone's.
Actually, you know what? I still feel bad. Damn ethics. I am now contemplating removing my Amazon store and losing even that little bit of income... In fact, I'm going to call for a vote. Please everyone leave your honest comment below: should I remove my Associates link or to carry on as above?
PS I apologise enormously for the title of this post. I couldn't resist.
Nicola Morgan is the author of books for teenagers and children, most of which (the books, not the teenagers etc) are available in physical bookshops and on the internet. Her latest books are Write to be Published and Tweet Right - The Sensible Person's Guide to Twitter, which is only available as an ebook. Her Amazon store is here!
Comments
This has been, for a long time, a very important subject to me as a bit of a DIY hippie. When I set up my micro-imprint eight cuts gallery press at the start of last year, with a small number of brilliant and like-minded writers on board, one of the first decisions we made was not to make our paperbacks available through Amazon for ethical reasons. If people wanted to buy online they could buy direct from the printer (giving our authors a bigger cut, making the cover price more sensible) but more than anything we wanted to work with a handful of passionate independent bookshops. At the time pretty much everyone said we were nuts (or worse), but it's a decision I'm very happy with. We're building some wonderful relationships with great shops that's meaningful to both parties - we *do* bring new customers through their doors on a regular basis, and they give us table and front of store display a publisher our size has no right to expect. Of course we sell very few books. But we publish experimental literary fiction (worse still, we have a collection of shorts and poems!). I've followed the rankings of some of the most feted and reviewed similar books on Amazon, and I've got a pretty good idea of how many they sell there, and the idea we've lost our authors a fortune by not being on Amazon is pure Cloudcuckooland. Of course, though, I recognise it's different for people writing in more commercial areas.
As I said in my post, I think every author should be at the heart of their literary community - not necessarily in geolocationary terms but in terms of the life of the world in which they write.
The other thing we can do, of course, is use our e-books to send people shop-ward - we control the content, we can make our introuction say anything we want. How about using it to recommend 5 or 10 of the very best bookshops where our paper books are to be found, and pointing people to the Guardian's bookstore map (a must, btw - everyone should make sure their local gem is listed, and add a review for it), and highlighting For Books' Sake's Battle of the Bookshops (http://forbookssake.net/category/features/bookshops/), again an indispensible bible of all that is literarily good.
And yes, of course we need to support local bookshops and libraries. So your spending your meagre profit locally seems like a great compromise.
But, underneath all that, there remains the ethical quagmire that is book-buying and selling. What seems so sad is that, buried among all the e-book/paper book and traditional/self-publishing and indie shops/Amazon debates we seem to have lost sight of the fact that we are all trying to create and sell and enjoy the same thing - and with that comes the real risk that libraries (which I think are fundamental as they are an institutional recognition that reading and learning and finding out is important) are drowned.
We all do what we can to get by - but then we need, also to support each other and the industry we love.
I have to make a living. Publishers were cold-shouldering me - Amazon, predatory as it may be, is actually beginning to pay me a small but steady sum per month.
Libraries started off as money-making enterprises before they were made free. Many charge you to borrow cds and dvds - I wouldn't be against paying a small sum to borrow an e-book for a fortnight (as is possible with Amazon). Independent bookshops could do this - going back to a very similar practice of 200 years ago (but without the electronics.) Both writers and bookshops would benefit
Thanks, Jo. I agree that some have lost sight of what's important. I can't stand the glee and vitriol that sometimes erupts in conversations about publishers and self-publishers.
Dan - congratulations on your new publication!
- yes, but the (or, rather, the traditional publishing industry) shifted their business model away from supporting writers first!
I agree we need to support bookshops and libraries, but it is very difficult to do that in the position we have been forced into by traditional publishing. We and the bookshops are both victims. If the only way we can make a living is hard on the booksellers, it's at least not AS hard on them as if we were driven out of business and didn't write any more books in either format.
I am not about to start producing my books in e-book format instead of publishing through traditional publishers, but I can understand those who are. And, as they are books that have generally been refused by publishers, or gone out of print and not been reprinted, those particular books would never have been in the bookshops anyway. So do it with awareness, but not too much guilt. And spending all the income in real bookshops is a brilliant, inspired idea!
I have to confess to using amazon but when you live on the side of a Welsh mountain and your nearest independent bookstore is a bus fare (equalling the price of a book) away, sometimes using the evil empire means the difference between being able to get a book and not.
In mitigation, I do shop at independent bookstores in Hay-on-Wye, Cardiff and further afield (whenever I get out to civilisation!) and frequently use my excellent local library.
My novels have been rejected and allowed to go out of print because they don't conform to a marketing model that suited retailers. (That my books suit readers is not in any doubt as my e-books are selling well and 2 of them have become bestsellers.)
I love bookshops of all kinds but I don't write books to keep retailers comfortably in business and I never did. Retailers were just the means of getting at my readers. Except that they weren'. They (and publishers' editors) were what stood between me and my readers.
Children's reading is not at risk as far as I can see. Primary children have been asked if they would prefer to read a tree book or a Kindle and they are saying Kindle. Boys are now more likely to read because it can be done on a gadget. Schools will use Kindles because the books are cheaper in the long run because they never need to be replaced and take up less room.
Apart from high-end specialist and collectors' books, the future is surely e-books and libraries. I sincerely hope bookshops do survive in the long run, but I don't actually think they will.
Very few people see the knocks we take and how we bruise. And I'm not talking about reviews - bad reviews are as nothing compared to an author being dropped by a publisher in a grotesque betrayal of trust and lack of respect for the heart and soul and damned hard work she or he has put in. I've seen it happen too often.
Anyway, that wasn't what I came here to say! I guess I'm just saying that yes, we have to do what we can for ourselves, but I still like to keep it as ethical as possible. Normally I'm a Benthamite but on this I have to put No 1 first.
On the other hand, children's reading is at risk anyway - it's at risk from the short-sighted decisions of publishers to publish too much froth and too little depth and variety. And, for the reasons you give, we can't remedy that by producing our deep books for Kindle.
I taught in a very socially deprived middle school in Norfolk and some kids arrived in Reception never having held a book. One of the first things their teachers had to do was teach them how to handle one.
Kids with motor control issues might also find a Kindle easier. A friend's husband suffering from MS has found his Kindle a godsend. He's got to the stage where holding a book & page-turning is beyond him.
What's most important to me as an author (and presumably also important to my publishers) is that people can easily find and buy my books when they want to buy them. At the moment this means going to Amazon for the e-books, but for my physical books they have a choice, and where they buy will depend entirely on how easy the bookstores make it for them to buy.
As an author I have no control over where my physcial books are sold, or how many copies are on the shelves of which stores. So I refuse to feel guilty if they are not in the shops and Amazon end up making most of my sales. An author's business model is quite different from a bookseller's or publisher's (or even an agent's) business model, and the Associates store you mention would seem to fit with that. So absolutely keep the store, if it enables you to continue your writing business.
This resonates for me as well, but with so many children not reading any more than they have to anyway, why not have a format that they could read, on a phone, a Kindle, a computer?
For me though I have another reason for responding. I have been an Amazon Affiliate for better than five years. they recently dropped me because I live in Arkansas. Arkansas has passed a law this past year which allows them to collect taxes on good sold from Arkansas residency online. This is regardless of whether the transaction even has any contact with the state other than coming from a link I posted.
I am almost to the point of boycotting Amazon for it, but it isn't their fault that the Arkansas legislature passed the law under the table along with some other reforms that people wanted.
I understand that my state isn't the only state doing this, and as a member of Commission Junction and Pepperjam, I have lost many advertisers there too.
Anyway, thanks for letting me air my rant. And I hope none of the rest of you have to deal with losing your revenue streams like this.