Yesterday night, after my adventures [1], I returned home to check my e-mail while I wrote and before I went to bed. One of the messages I got was a request from Amazon (through Kindle Direct Publishing, which publishes some of my books [2]) asking me to write to Hachette Publishing on their behalf in a dispute over the price of e-books, with talking points provided. The e-mail recognizes, quite rightly, that some writers may not be well-disposed to intervene in what is clearly a contest between two massive companies arguing over what is best for them while each of them attempts to invoke the well-being of a community of writers, with the knowledge and expectation that writers would appreciate a larger total profit with a larger audience rather than larger per unit prices. This seems to me to be a reasonable sort of expectation. Nevertheless, there are a few elements of this appeal that I thought worthwhile to write about.

In the first place, and this may be some kind of excessive modesty and diffidence on my part, but I have a hard time thinking of myself as someone who is very capable of writing on behalf of the community of authors as a whole. To be sure, authors are a genuine community, albeit a somewhat diffuse one at times. Not all groups of people, it should be noted, are communities. As I often comment on, I am a single man, and yet singles are not themselves a community, while writers are. The issue at stake is a matter of choice and identity. Writers are a community because we have a passion for writing, regardless of whether it is a profitable avocation for us in any form. Because we share a love, we are a community, in the same fashion that genre fans are a community because of a shared love of speculative fiction (science fiction and fantasy) or the novels of Jane Austen. On the other hand, singles are not a good community because being single is something that most people want desperately to escape, which it makes for difficulties in inducing cohesion to such people. Cohesion and community can easily be developed out of a common threat or out of a common love, but not generally out of a shared status that we are all too willing and eager to get rid of when it is possible for us to do so.

I also feel it appropriate (not that I am the best judge, necessarily, of what is appropriate) to comment that I do agree with Amazon’s talking point about writers preferring a larger reading audience and more money as opposed to a higher amount of money per copy of material sold. Within the section of the community of writers who I am personally familiar with as friends or as a prolific reader of copies reviewed in exchange for an honest review, it is clear that writers are most passionate about sharing their writing with others. This has been the case, from what I have read at least, for many musicians as well, who relish the ability of the internet to allow a greater number of people to become familiar with our creation, and to share in creation and the enjoyment of what others have created. Indeed, although e-books (and “new media”) in general require a certain amount of flexibility to deal with new mediums and find some way of tapping into the increased creativity that comes from increased involvement of people in writing (and other forms of art) while simultaneously finding some way of profiting from that, as will inevitably be the case given the desire of people to be paid for their creation and the fact that our society itself gives great profits to those who are able to successfully market the work of others, I am generally of the opinion that the new media is a good thing. Then again, I am a blogger who occasionally writes e-books, so perhaps I am a little biased on the matter.

I would also like to comment on the question of what stakes I have in this debate. I must say that I am not particularly familiar with the behavior of Hatchette or their lengthy legal disputes with Amazon. Given all that I deal with, the politics of business disputes, even with regards to publishing, is not something I consider myself very knowledgeable about. As a writer, I have certainly not profited enough in terms of money to have a very large stake at this particular time in the dispute, although theoretically I have a certain degree of concern given my aspirations to keep writing and to add to my body of works little by little. I do not make enough money myself as a writer to see a great deal of difference in terms of the specific pricing disputes that the two companies have. To be sure, I am not a well-known enough writer that anyone would buy a work of mine at the price of $19.99 a copy at this point, but neither am I a well-known enough writer that I have received any royalty checks from Amazon yet either. So, at this moment, I am watching a fight between two large companies, and wondering when I will have a big enough stake in the fight to do more than a brief amount of writing in a personal essay like this one. I suppose we shall see, as with so much else.

[1] https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/08/10/this-is-not-where-i-parked-my-car/

[2] See, for example: