A Letter to Doug Preston

So I’ve sat quietly and absorbed the mighty fury that Doug Preston and the Authors United group have unleashed upon Amazon in their latest round of pressure tactics. Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of a somewhat sternly worded yet awkwardly kiss-ass proposed letter to Amazon’s board of directors! Oooooh! It burns just thinking about all the carnage these kinds of extreme tactics will bring!

With open letters to people suddenly being all the rage, today, I thought I’d pen one with some advice for Doug Preston and the Pretensions:

Dear Mr. Preston,

Just stop. You’re making a fool of yourself. Your arguments are misdirected, faulty, elitist and lacking in any evidence of your awareness that a world exists beyond the little bubble of your personal experience, which in no way reflects the experiences of the vast majority of writers you and your group of self-important do-gooders claim to be speaking for. In the immortal words of Black Dynamite, you need to shut the fuck up when grown folks is talking.

Normally, I would just pluck some quotes from your letter and comment on them but this effort from your group doesn’t even raise to the level of deserving such treatment. There’s not a single element that merits the attention of anyone actually interested in the business reality of the matter, let alone serious consideration. You’ve revealed yourself to have zero knowledge of retail business agreements, and even less understanding of contracts and who is accountable for what and to whom within them. Despite your protestations on each count, you’ve shown yourself to be both cluelessly elitist and most definitively staking out a side.

Whether you realize it or not, your attempt to shame the board is actually reinforcing to them that the tactics being used in the negotiations by Amazon have been extraordinarily effective. Little tip for the future, generally speaking, when involved in a contentious negotiation with a stronger party, you typically don’t want to begin by providing a point by point list of how badly your circumstances are unless you’re trying to get the side you’re implicitly supporting to end up eviscerated in whatever deal finally results. In fact, your sad attempts at garnering sympathy by talking about how far your sales have fallen, especially the point about other retailers failing to make up the difference, may be making a strong case that Amazon isn’t asking enough for their contributions in selling Hachette’s books. Think before you speak, and think twice before you broadcast it to the world. You can play the “we’re not involved” card all you like to appear impartial but you can’t possibly be ignorant enough of reality to believe that, can you?

You should also be aware that when you spout off about how special books are, how much they’re not like other products and the people who write them deserve special dispensation from the hard economic realities everyone else on the fucking planet faces just to put food on the table every damn day, you sound precisely like a man who’s spent his whole professional life sheltered. Can you tell me where you’ve met these young writers who get advances large enough to live on before they write their first books, based on simply the idea? Did you ride your unicorn over the rainbow to chat with them about it?

Not to mention, Amazon will ship my books right now, there’s no delay. I can get preorders on books right now, there’s no prohibition. And so can everybody else except people like you because the contract you signed prevents it. Every last complaint you have could be addressed but for the fact that you willingly chose to give the rights to your work and any power or influence to do anything about it to someone else. That’s why you’re left doing nothing but throwing nonsense missives at people who have precisely zero reason to listen to a single word you have to say. You don’t like the results of Hachette’s business dealings with Amazon? Take it out on them. And if those dealings are negatively impacting your career because they can’t reach a deal with the largest retailer of books in the world, I’m sympathetic but that’s your problem, the result of the path you chose, to take the advance and give up control.

I’m sorry that you’re having these issues and I feel for the newly enlisted writers whose careers may suffer but nobody is entitled to anything. Those of us here in reality understand that. You know how you earn a living? You hustle and adapt and take advantage of opportunities. You don’t bitch and moan at other businesses who have no legal, moral or ethical obligation to you when the one you signed on with drops the ball or can’t keep the promises they made you. That’s life. It’s hard, ever-shifting and filled with risk. Don’t like it? Too goddamned bad! Welcome to the club with the rest of us.

One area where you’re mostly right is that books can’t be written more cheaply. That’s because 99% of them are already written for free. The struggle is to find a buyer after they’ve been written. That’s the world most of us live in. However, one of your esteemed signees, James Patterson, gets advances into seven figures. Could those books be written any cheaper? What was your last advance, sir? Could you have written it any cheaper? If you’re moving books, I have no issue with that. But that’s a commercial argument, justifiable, or not, in the numbers as I’m sure you’d agree. Your group, however, is trading in sentimentality and actively arguing for being exempt from normal commercial pressures. You can’t have it both ways, the commercial argument when it’s your check on the line and the non-commercial one for everybody else. We have a word for that; it’s called hypocrisy.

If you’re so concerned that Amazon is siphoning away the resources publishers use to support authors, how about putting your money where your mouth is? And I don’t mean on another tone-deaf and extraordinarily wasteful print ad in the New York Times. Jesus, you do realize we’re in the 21st century now, right?!? Tell Hachette you’ll forego an advance on your next book so long as that money gets divided up amongst a few first time or midlist authors. You and all of your best selling brethren could support the early careers of numerous young authors if you chose to wield the leverage and resources you have in the direction you can actually use it, on your own publishers. Advocate for change; better treatment, bigger advances, higher royalties, no egregious non-competes. If you’re not willing to even pay lip service to doing that, then get the hell outta here with your false sentimentality.

If authors are united under the whiny, perspective-lacking, factually detached line of nonsense you’re pushing, then I’m happy to let you all keep that term for your self-important, “prominent” and “outraged” selves. I’m a writer. I work for my living and earn my money any way I can. Nobody, least of all, Amazon, owes me a goddamned thing. If you just want to throw some kind of disingenuous shade of a literary culture argument out there to protect your own position and sizable advances without even taking the time to understand the whole of the industry and the interests of writers not like you, then as far as I’m concerned, you and yours can unite together and go jump off a cliff.

In short, to hell with you. Go away before you do even more damage to the poor writers attracted by your self serving bullshit and misrepresented ideals of what publishing actually is. Let those of us interested in the future and paving new paths to our careers go about it in peace. We don’t need your high-minded horseshit, especially when you don’t even bother to take the time to educate yourself.

As an example of the kind of damage your sad little group is doing, watch Authors Guild President Roxana Robinson in this interview segment. I’m certain you’ve already seen it. Does it make you feel good to see someone in her position, one that could be a strong advocate for authors, made to look like a blabbering fool, spouting occasional lines from your letter in between completely incoherent arguments?

Watch the end very closely, because it encapsulates the flaws of your entire movement. When faced with a clear, concise, logical (and some would say common sense) economic argument, she was left muttering, largely to herself, “I am not a special snowflake!” Even the moderator was laughing at her. Your group, your rhetoric has revealed to Authors Guild members a leader woefully ignorant of business realities. Do you think Guild members feel good about their leadership after watching that? It was painfully embarassing. As is your letter to the Amazon board. Do yourself, and all of us, a favor and just stop talking before you embarrass yourself, and by extension all writers, any further. Have a nice day!

Dan Meadows is a writer living on the banks of the Chesapeake Bay. Follow him on Twitter @watershedchron