Is Amazon all BS?

There is no doubt that more people are reading than ever before. They are buying more books too, in a variety of formats. But are they reading crap? Is the reading public being dumb-downed by the tidal wave of literary garbage that book purveyors like Amazon.com have made cheap, available and convenient? Has it changed how we define books and what we expect from them? Can it be that literature is being sacrificed on an altar of BS (the Best Seller)? Is the situation analogous, as Ursula K. LeGuin says, to the promotion of fast-food: The readability of many best sellers is much like the edibility of junk food. Agribusiness and the food packagers sell us sweetened fat to live on, so we come to think that’s what food is. Amazon uses the BS Machine to sell us sweetened fat to live on, so we begin to think that’s what literature is. I believe that reading only packaged microwavable fiction ruins the taste, destabilizes the moral blood pressure, and makes the mind obese.

My take on whether Amazon is to blame for dumbing down books is in agreement with this writer's when he says, The mass culture has been convicted of killing off serious writing for about as long as there has been a mass culture. I don't agree with LeGuin that just because McDonalds sells more burgers and fries than any other restaurant, people think that that's what food is. In fact, people got tired of Big Macs, which is why McDonalds is selling salads these days. Mass marketing changes things for a while, and then they change again. People have always bought books in a variety of new formats and controversy has typically ensued with the introduction of each new format to the marketplace. For instance, when the mass market paperback was first produced and sales of pulp fiction skyrocketed, purists made the similar arguments about the decline of the literary novel. And yet great novels continued to be written and sold. Like the advent of pocketbooks, ebooks have made reading more affordable and convenient. When it comes to the book market, the general rule has always been that there is no general rule. Tastes change. People read books for a variety of reasons including enjoyment, education, escape, entertainment, and enrichment. The beauty of books is that they can satisfy all these needs. There are books that cater to the largest segment of the reading public (Harlequin romances etc.) and there are books that cater to smaller, more refined segments. What I will say about books in the digital era is that there is a lot more of them, and there is much more choice and variety, which is about all I'm willing to pronounce about the fate of literature. 

But from the point of view of this author, I think Amazon has been, on balance, positive. Yes, there is a lot more crap out there, which means it's more difficult to garner attention for any particular book. People have to be more creative in this highly competitive, crowded marketplace. But as a publishing, marketing and selling platform, Amazon has empowered authors in a game-changing way, and that's significant, since authors were so powerless before. 

Here, for what it's worth, is my experience a nutshell. My debut novel was published by a small respected independent publisher nine years ago. It garnered quite a few good reviews in local and national newspapers, and was shortlisted for a respected national first novel prize. It sold relatively well in the national market, relatively, that is, for a first novel by a completely unknown writer, and in a national market that is relatively small. There were no sales whatsoever internationally. My royalties, at the standard rate of 10% of the cover price were pretty paltry. 

Almost eight years after it first appeared I decided to re-issue my novel myself in ebook format (in the contract with my original publisher I had not signed over the digital rights - it was still early in the game.) Amazon enabled me to make the novel available, quickly and easily, and to reach an international market. In the eighteen months since making the book available it has sold steadily and one hundred percent of new sales have been international. Copies sold have not yet reached the number of the previous eight years of the print edition - which benefited at the outset from some mainstream media attention and the sheer luck of having been nominated for that aforementioned national prize - but it's getting close, and with absolutely no marketing investment to speak of. Since the author's royalty from the ebook is seven times higher than that the royalty I received from the print edition, even though the cover price is half, the revenue from ebook sales will shortly surpass the print edition in a fraction of the time. On top of that, I retain complete control, no waiting for sales reports from a publisher or agent, no waiting for payment (the royalty cheque arrives on time and regularly). Admittedly, the main challenge remains marketing, how to get the book some attention, but Amazon provides a number of tools that make marketing, on a small, economical and highly selective scale, possible and simple, even for a doofus like me. Amazon has enabled the author to be an entrepreneur with his own product, and that's no BS. I like to think, though its unprovable so far, that the reason my book has sold almost a decade after it was published, is that Amazon gave it a chance to find its readership and that the quality of the work has prevailed. Unlike many good books that are abandoned by their publishers and go out of print if they have not found their readers within the allotted time, ebooks have an indefinite lifespan, which is about as much time as any author can hope for.