This is Small Business Week, celebrating American entrepreneurs. Which makes for a nice irony, in that the business practices of Amazon against Hachette books has recently come to light. I am not published by Hachette, but many of my friends are, and many of the books on my shelves come from that house. However, contract negotiations between The Great River and Hachette have begun to affect writers, in a way that makes one wonder about the laws of monopoly.
To be clear: I do use Amazon, although I don’t shop there much. I sell a lot of books through Amazon, and have had reason to be grateful for the ease in their Kindle publishing software. They have shown me nothing but respect and professionalism.
But were I an Hachette author? Books from those writers are mysteriously delayed, or fail to be reordered, or raised in price. And then there’s this: how many Hachette authors, compared with, say, Random House, are displayed beneath a banner suggesting OTHER books that are available at a cheaper price? More or less at random, click on the links and compare these: