Echo1883

Ask me anything! (Except Scientology stuff... I'll just ignore those questions)

For the record we know where Shelly is, so it's time to retire that line or rhetoric. Tony Ortega wrote about it, twice if I'm not mistaken. She's at Twin Peaks near Lake Arrowhead in CA. It's a Sea Org compound which is archiving Scientology docs to protect them against the apocalypse they fear is being brought about by Psychiatry.

Whether or not she's free to leave is an entirely different question, but we do know WHERE she is, so the "where's Shelly" question makes us critics look like idiots who can't do basic research.

they are the crystallization of a particularly repellent Puritanical capitalism whose goal is to grow and "disrupt," instead of serving as a way for the people involved to earn a living and retain human dignity.

I know a person who works for Amazon and I know he works BRUTAL hours and has mandatory over time like every week. I don't know how well he is paid but I do see your point. I feel a local opposite for me would be Boeing. I live near(ish) to Boeing and I know them to be a a pretty solid career for anyone who works there.

On your second point, as a reader who is fairly young and has a taste for longer series I do not tend to look for new, unique books but tend toward the genre's (sci-fi/fantasy) and authors I already know and have known for many years (Orson Scott Card, Stephen King, Terry Goodkind). I will have to take your word on the limits of self-marketing and the struggle of promoting via Amazon. Doesn't mean I disagree or don't understand, I just have no direct experience with this aspect of the publication process.

Third point. I can absolutely agree. I do not know where the best places to buy books are to give authors the most market share of the purchase price so any help here would be appreciated. I agree with your conceptual disagreement with the "walmart effect" that things get devalued because the store wants to lower their price so as to attract customers for other reasons. The issue is that the customer ultimately decides somethings value, and I cannot blame Amazon for being better at marketing than other potential sellers. What this says to me is we need to raise the perceived value of books and literature in our culture and encourage first party sales (direct from the author, not sure if thats the correct term here). If a culture de-values something then the place where its cheapest wins. You could draw parallels to all kinds of other things (food, we de-value nutrition so since McDonalds is cheap, fast, and tasty, it wins over healthier options) and this is more of a cultural problem then an economic matter regarding Amazon as a company. But I digress. I also did not know that Amazon sells books at a loss, so I learned something new.

Fourth point. I highly disagree with censorship of any kind. This is because I know I have the ability to censory my own damn self. If I don't want to read a story about a dude vandalizing public toilets (to use an example from this very thread) then I won't read the book. If I had reached the last 1/4 of Wizard's First Rule (one of my favorite books/authors) and found the theme of the end of the book objectionable then I would have stopped reading. There is never ANY reason to censor anything. I agree and find this point to be your absolute strongest by far. Censorship is a terrifying subject. 1984 and Brave New World (to name two of the most famous dystopian books in history) both show fantastic descriptions of a world where a select few decide what the masses are "allowed" to consume as entertainment, news and information in general.

All in all you gave a great account of what makes Amazon bad for the general author community and economy of american literature. I have no doubt I will be coming across American Lit in college before too long and may have to dredge this topic back up. Thanks for the reply. I am most certainly in NO way an expert on anything relating to economics or literature or authorship so please correct me if anything I said was off the mark. Please add to my understanding as you see fit. Unfortuantely I do not DISAGREE with anything in particular you said so it is a little hard to maintain a solid discussion without any debate or counter points.

And thanks for the AMA. They are always interesting when the person holds a unique status, job, belief, etc.

They want literature to be essentially an eerie, shameful masturbation booth: come in alone, get what you came for, get out and read it in your house, alone, maybe with the robot that delivered it to you. Whatever you want, we'll keep it in print, we won't ask questions, we won't judge. I kind of want my publishers to judge, to have fun tastes that I can question and enjoy?

I like this description. I know that when I go see a pixar movie it will have this or that theme and that it will NOT be a psychological thriller with sex appeal, violence and danger (ok WALL-E had all of that, but now we are just splitting hairs). I think book publishers should be similar. I don't know every author who has ever written a word, but if I know 35 publishers and of those 35 I know that I prefer this list of 3 then I have a starting point to find a book. I know I can go look for books that publisher has put out and will more than likely find something I would enjoy. I can ALSO do that in reverse, I can go to a publisher I do NOT normally frequent and see what they have recently put out and maybe find a series I enjoy.

For example, I use friends in this regard. I find out what they are reading, what they like, what they recommend. And let their judgement of what I like and dont like help me decide whether I would enjoy a new series. I was never a fan of Fantasy novels and now I am reading Wheel of Time and my all time favorite series is Sword of Truth. The discovery of new genres, new stories, and new authors is what makes reading fun.

I truly hope that the economy of all the media arts (movies, tv shows, video games, books, comics, etc) stays strong and Amazon or other companies don't ruin it. Now I want to look into some of the larger corps that I use for stuff (like Comixology for comics or Hulu/Netflix for their respective purposes) to ensure that the creators are being fairly represented and compensated to maintain a healthy creative atmosphere.

Since you begged the question (literally, you asked me to ask you) what does Amazon do to American Literature? The more in depth the better. I am just curious to hear a publisher's take on what a "healthy" literature economy would be and how Amazon harms that economy.