Saturday, February 18, 2012

Heads up, buttercups.

Passive Voice Blog takes on the latest Authors Guild post.

My personal favorite is the takedown of this statement:

Without it, browsing in a bookstore would become a thing of the past for much of the country, and we would largely lose the most important means for new literary voices to be discovered.

Yes, the thousands upon thousands of people finding money (maybe a little, maybe more) and fulfillment through self-publishing that they almost certainly never would have managed by going through traditional channels, they don't exist, right? I'm imagining 85% of the books on my ereader? Gotcha.

Look, Amazon has no one's best interests at heart but their own. They're an amoral entity in the truest sense of the word, and I don't for a second think that zealotry should overtake common sense in working with them. However, they've done more and for more authors than any other publishing breakthrough in the past fifteen years. Lining up with the monster book chain that actually put more independent book stores out of business than any other against Amazon and pretending it's a moral crusade is a bit silly.

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