Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
There's only one thing I don't get about Ursula K. Le Guin's article: Why decry Amazon in particular? Doesn't every bookstore - B&M or online - do exactly the same thing? Walk into, or click into, any book store, and what fills the visual space? Whatever books are currently being pushed as "best sellers".
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Why?
Probably because in her circles it has become axiomatic, an article of faith, that Amazon is the only cause of all the evils in the (publishing) world and no amount of evidence to the contrary will convince the true believers.
Facts don't matter.
It doesn't matter that it is the publishers who decide which manuscripts they buy and which they ignore. It's all Amazon's fault.
It doesn't matter that it is the publishers who decide which books stay in print and which go out of print. It's all Amazon's fault.
It doesn't matter that it was the publishers favoring Borders and B&N that killed thousands of independent bookstores long before Amazon came about. It's all Amazon's fault.
It doesn't matter that the entire bestseller-driven business model has been around for decades before Bezos set up shop. It's all Amazon's fault.
It doesn't matter that Borders management couldn't find their rear without GPS, ignored the emerging online sales channel, degraded their in-store shopping experience, mismanaged their inventory and ended up in debt to the big publishers, landing in bankruptcy court where the publishers insistence on being paid immediately forced Borders out of restructuring and into outright liquidation. It's all Amazon's fault.
It doesn't matter that B&N bungled their Nook hardware inventory control after forcing a move to (profitless) near cost pricing of readers and tablets and started a death spiral that has cut their ebook market share from 25% to the low single digits in a growing market. That they received hundreds of millions of dollars from Microsoft to deliver and maintain a reading app for Windows and failed to deliver so MS had to take over support of the Win8 app. It's all Amazon's fault.
In LeGuin's world view, Amazon tells publishers which manuscripts to buy and which authors to "disappear" (presumably sending midnight hit squads to kidnap them and dump them in an unmarked mass grave somewhere) and Amazon tells the millions upon millions of readers out there to buy Grisham and Roberts, Patterson and Collins, Rowling and James, King and Child, and *not* ever ever buy... well, LeGuin.
Because, if you go online and look at LeGuin book sales rankings (easy to do, btw) you can see that of the dozens of books she's written since the 1950's, her top seller is the 50 year old LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS (required reading in many liberal arts colleges) and it ranked at a very respectable 10,432 the last time I looked. She also had a title at 30,000, another at 40,000, one at 70,000, and one at 100,000. Those rankings translate to about 26 books per day at 10,000 and 1 book a day at 100,000. If Amazon constitutes half the total trade book market as their detractors claim, that would suggest she is selling about a hundred books a day in the US alone. That is a nice, respectable clip. Of course, the bulk of those sales are mass market paperbacks at $6-7 and a traditional royalty of 8% (clearing her about a half buck each) but the rest are trade paperbacks and hardcover and even some ebooks and audiobooks so she is probably averaging about $2 per sale. $200 bucks a day times 365 days, that's about $75k a year from the US alone.
A nice middle class income.
Of course, it doesn't really compare to the tens of millions that the Patterson bookmill produces each year, the hundreds of millions generated by 50 Shades and Hunger Games, the billions generated by Rowling.
LeGuin is 85 and it is clear by her diatribes that she is clearly not happy that 70 years of writing have yielded her some awards, a PBS TV movie and a SyFy miniseries, a measure of acclaim in some political circles, and a recognizable name in SF&F. Plus what looks to be a nice retirement income.
For many that would be a nice payoff for a lifetime of work.
But LeGuin...
She is unhappy and unwilling to accept the world for what it is.
A world that would rather read about tough guy car chases and boy wizards than about Omelas. That values raunchy softcore "mommy porn" over metaphorical musings of 60's sexual politics.
That is simply *wrong* in her eyes.
And, of course, it is all Amazon's fault.