Amazon is my shepherd. I shall not want. - Bill Kirton

by Bill Kirton

Those nice people at Amazon emailed me recently to say there was a book they were sure would be of great interest to me. And they were right. The only problem was that I’d not only read it, I’d written it. The book in question was the fourth in the series I’d written for Pearson, Brilliant Workplace Skills, and, to try to penetrate as well as benefit from their marketing strategy, I asked myself why they decided that that was the book for me.

First, why Workplace Skills rather than the others? I’m well past retirement age and, in fact, I took early retirement to concentrate on my writing, so I only share my workspace with me. Which means I have little need for the book’s insights into topics such as promotion prospects and how to enhance them, interpersonal relationships, office politics and protocols. And as for the likelihood of me finding romance in the workplace... well, really! So I have to conclude that they couldn’t have thought the content would be of interest.

Which leaves style. Maybe they thought ‘Ah, he’s a writer. He’ll appreciate the finely rounded phrases here, the prose rhythms and cadences, the immaculate structuring of arguments, the inspired organisation of the material and the impeccable choice of words’. But no, style and content can’t be separated so arbitrarily. And anyway, all of you, the sophisticated literati who read these blogs, will already have curled a scornful lip at the inept, heavy-handed irony of this paragraph and dismissed it as a mere filler, a pretence that this posting has a theme, a direction, a purpose.

So what else? Maybe they’ve looked at my novels and decided that the fiction writer in me needs to be mentored by his non-fiction counterpart. After all, I’m clearly rubbish at writing crime novels. My detective makes jokes, doesn’t have a drink or drug problem, isn’t particularly scruffy and lives with a funny, attractive woman to whom he’s happily married. He cares about people, too, and he’s more interested in truth than in justice, so he’s obviously not cut out to be between the covers of a modern crime novel. And, even when I try history, the crime bit gets overtaken or at least muddied up by romance. As for The Sparrow Conundrum, what self-respecting auteur would admit to committing such garbage to paper (or screen)? It's not even mid-list, for God's sake. And Alternative Dimension? Well, it’s almost a confession that I’ve lost touch with reality.

Or maybe there’s something else, something unthinkable really. Maybe, in their desire to dominate the world and take the place of oxygen, the Amazon king-makers have lost the plot. They clearly have a ante-pre-post-modern-structuralist attitude to taxation, for example, and their zero hours employment practices have overtones of the original industrial revolution. And now their boss has bought The Washington Post. OK, there's no denying that their ebook revolution has, mostly, brought opportunities (and revenue) to writers who previously could only gaze through steamed-up windows at the frolics of those the gatekeepers had favoured. And yet, and yet...

Could it be that they … I hesitate to articulate it … they know very little about books? Surely they don’t think Brilliant Workplace Skills is a … a product, something electronic maybe, an executive toy, an object you put on your desk and … well, play with until it’s time to go home. No, that can’t be it. Amazon is the pinnacle of evolution, the ne plus ultra of refinement and civilisation. Amazon is the reason the Big Bang happened. No, the fault must lie in me (and, no doubt, many other writers). Amazon can’t possibly have made a mistake.

(The car, by the way, is a 1956 Volvo Amazon. I got the picture from Phil Seed’s Virtual Car Museum http://www.philseed.com/volvo-121.html.)