Seth Godin and Amazon Enter the Hybrid Publishing Game–So What?
by caleb j seeling
When author and visionary Seth Godin announced his partnership with Amazon to “create a new publishing model.” Amazon followed with a news release of their own, which you can read here.
Frankly, there’s nothing new about what they’re up to–it’s the hybrid model that little guys like me have been tinkering with for the last few years. Except Amazon and Godin are flexing their respective muscles, combining their brands, to take it mainstream.
What difference it will make for the millions of awesome, non-bestselling authors has yet to be seen, but in his blog, Godin makes no apologies for completely cutting out booksellers or publishers. He goes almost so far as to call them anachronistic and a waste of money. I’ve heard this argument plenty of times before and there is some truth to it, but some harm as well.
Recently, I had a good gentleman’s quarrel with my friend, an owner of a great indie bookstore in Pennsylvania, about this very issue. I had asked him to review one of the books I had published, forgetting that throughout the text and in an ad in the back, the reader is encouraged to purchase more books through Amazon. There is no suggestion to ask your local bookstore to order it for you. My friend took offense to this and refused to sell the book. We each aired our frustrations at the economic hardship of being the small guys who take the biggest risks to serve our authors and customers, and realized we were in the same boat.
There are plenty of great articles that cover the pros and cons of the democratization of the publishing process, but what Byron and I agree on is that the value of face-to-face community and region-specific color that independent bookstores and publishers provide is irreplaceable. It is a major cultural error to brush them off with a flippant “it’s the way things are now,” because the ones shoving them aside are not the readers themselves, but the trend setting mega-brands we obediently follow that are powered by dollars, not relationship.
Godin himself is going down this road, “hiring” only three people to help him with his Domino Project for seven months, paying them by his presence and experience, supplemented by a mere $25k. Probably they’ll have to live in his office for all that they will afford, and he’ll probably have them working hard enough that they won’t be able to leave anyway. Meanwhile, he’ll rake in the dinero, laughing that he has enough tribal power to tell his new bud Jeff Bezos that Amazon needs to hold off on their press release until he gets his blog post out.
Sounds like I’m drinking my own sour grape Kool-Aid, and maybe I am, but what powers me is community and culture, and I’m committed to fighting for it. It is so easy to get caught up in the simple, fancy words of “futurists,” to be blinded by the dazzle of potential dollars when the rich folk let us play their backyards, that it is easy to forget the power and meaning of individual human interaction and regionality.
Yes, “powered by Amazon” is the way things are going in general, and God bless them for the opportunities they have created for the little guys and for driving book prices down for the every day reader. And I like a lot of what Godin says in his blogs. We need the macro-level commerce and ideas people and companies like them provide, but we need to keep investing in the micro-level too. You are located in a particular place, geographically and relationally, and that place is critical to the American mosaic. There is culture there that isn’t found anywhere else, powered by relationships, that needs to be preserved and grown. And local booksellers and publishers are some of the keepers and distributors of that culture. “Powered by Amazon” cannot compete with what they can provide.