John Scalzi has been encouraging us readers to go out and buy books by Macmillan authors to help them through while their books are not on Amazon. In view of this (and to test out the Book Depository folks), here are some suggestions taken from the very excellent Locus Recommended Reading List.
- Green, Jay Lake
- Boneshaker, Cherie Priest
- Julian Comstock, Robert Charles Wilson
- Lamentation and Canticle, Ken Scholes
- The Price of Spring, Daniel Abraham
- The Revolution Business, Charles Stross
While I appreciate the sentiment, and the desire to support authors, this rather implies that buying a book elsewhere now will help an author now, when I would guess most only get royalty statements/checks perhaps twice a year? I definitely agree that anyone who was going to buy a Macmillan book on Amazon would do well to find a way to buy it elsewhere, but I’m not sure it makes sense to call on everyone to suddenly buy a bunch of books they weren’t planning to buy otherwise, especially considering the other causes in the hopper right now (including ongoing Haiti efforts).
If that sounds heartless, I apologize — I do indeed think authors are getting shafted here. But I’m afraid John’s plea doesn’t quite make sense to me as is. It comes across a bit as “oh, here’s something I can use to urge people to buy books.” If the books get restored to Amazon quickly (and I realize there’s no guarantee that will happen), I feel as though it may be jumping the gun considering the lag time between now and the next royalty payments.
I’m willing to listen to opinions to the contrary, of course.
If I worried about whether one cause I happen to be espousing is more deserving than any other at that time I’d probably be so paralyzed with indecision that I’d never do anything. And whatever decision I made would not meet the approval of everyone. So generally I trust my readers to make up their own minds whether any particular cause is worth giving money to.
And here’s that opinion to the contrary….. someone (Making Light?) made mention of how this IS specifically hurting authors who have their initial book releases while this is going on. That I can definitely see.
I think this is silly: have you looked at pricing on Macmillan brand books now? Kindle books at .45 less than a HC? I think I’ll use the whip of my $$$ (and the e-mails I sent to Tor and Macmillan) to indicate my displeasure with this pricing. Royalties run what, 6 months to a year behind? Let’s make certain Macmillan sees that we have noticed and disapproved of their gouging. Let’s see some actual price dynamism before we start buying this publisher’s books. If there’s a new author you want to buy- perhaps it should be with an e-mail saying why you are buying the book rather than waiting for a dynamic pricing scheme. And perhaps this is actually time to advocate for Baen, a great imprint with real dynamic and decent pricing, or CJ Cherryh’s new website where she and friends independently promote book at good prices or Bookview Cafe, a collective of authors… or anyone but Macmillan.
Hey, I didn’t put this post up for the benefit of people who think that Macmillan and their authors are greedy, rapacious bastards. I did it for the benefit of people who want to help Tor authors (and because I’m testing out an alternative to Amazon’s affiliate scheme). If you don’t want to buy those books you don’t have to.
I don’t think those epithets apply to the authors or even to the good folk who work on the books. I will apply it to the publishing company.
Murdoch has now stated that he thinks that, even though Amazon pays the standard price for books and then eats the loss(for those who thought authors were being shafted by Amazon), he thinks that’s “bad”. Since Harper, Collins is a piece of Murdoch’s empire, we should see something there soon as well, I would guess.
All I can do is boycott these e-books, in the cases of authors I want to read. But that hurts me, because it damages the market for the product I want (non-physical books) and reinforces the publishing companies belief that e-books are marginal and can be held artificially high (because early adopters and a small market result in non-typical , non- equilibrium pricing).
Well my husband already thinks i’m on a one woman campaign to save the publishing industry by buying as many books as possible, but I shall be keeping an eye out in waterstones for new titles by affected authors. Regardless of whether and when they might feel the financial benefit sales are always a good thing.
As far as amazon. Well this was the last straw to get me to sign up with the book depository and (for vids, cd’s etc) Play. I prefer to use high street bookshops when I can and will pay more to do so, but will only go to amazon now when I have exhausted all other possibilities.
Thanks for posting this Cheryl, I saw the original on Whatever, but didn’t want to get into it there.