Searching blogs for "Macmillan" "Amazon" and "boycott"?

[walkitout]

I think that's what happened to land the commenter on yesterday's post who thought I was boycotting Macmillan and hadn't paid any attention to the details (that it didn't mean anything, that it was Macmillan and B&N, that it was specifically over the availability of Preston's _Impact_ at B&N for $8.87 for the Nook while simultaneously not available at Amazon, and I ended it when it showed up at Amazon for the same price -- and all that happened _before_ the idiot commented).

I think there are a bunch of people out there looking for people who are not happy about Macmillan's part in this and contemplating avoiding them. I like PNH too much to _seriously_ advocate boycotting Macmillan, but more importantly, me boycotting Macmillan would have _zero_ impact. I did a detailed analysis of my last 12 months of book purchases on- and off-line, and I buy vanishingly few Macmillan books and most of those are bought used. If Macmillan disappeared tomorrow or two months ago or a year from now, _I would not notice_. Kinda like how it wouldn't mean anything for me to boycott Wal-mart or K-mart or Sears. If you don't shop there anyway, you can't impact them by "voting with your dollars". You already have.

But doesn't that matter? Way more than any crap going on with the pricing of e-editions while the book is in hardcover? I recognize that Macmillan is in sad shape, but I don't think that can be laid exclusively, or even primarily, at Amazon's door. Next up: an analysis of the current NYT Hardcover Fiction and Non-Fiction bestsellers (the top 15 of each).

Fiction: OWNED by the big 6. 4 each from Penguin, Hachette and Random House. One each from Simon & Schuster, Harper and Macmillan.

Non-fiction is a little more interesting: 1 Eagle/Regnery (more on that), 1 Disney/Hyperion, 4 Harper, 3 each Penguin and Hachette, 2 Macmillan, 1 Random House

I remember Regnery. At the time I remember encountering them (as a huge fulfillment problem), they were an independent that had a bunch of different names and didn't answer the phone. Since then, they've been bought by Eagle, which also does some periodical stuff. They are politically conservative, and I don't mean like the Domino's guy is conservative -- I mean their content is all conservative.

And may I just say, goddess does Malcolm Gladwell sell. I mean, I _knew_ that, but geez. No wonder no one tries to make him look more conventional for book outings. I can only imagine the services Hachette deploys to keep him happy.

Comments

[jinasphinx.livejournal.com]

This is very interesting. Before all this happened, I never thought much about publisher (I recognized Tor books, but I didn't know Tor was an imprint of Macmillan).

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Malcolm Gladwell bugs the heck out of me, for reasons that Steven Pinker elucidates pretty clearly in http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/books/review/Pinker-t.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all. Not that I think most popular nonfiction writers handle statistics and such very well, and of course they almost all do that thing of taking one teeny-tiny idea that is either common sense or a special case (or, of course, really not true at all) and getting a whole book out of it, which is SO FRUSTRATING, not to mention jealousy-inducing.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

In general news: Jo Walton (author of the Small Change trilogy, which I basically liked very much, though with some reservations) says her grand total of royalties EVAR from e-books stands at $2.50: http://papersky.livejournal.com/461563.html. She said "My opinion continues to be that I don't understand what's happening and eventually everything will look very different. I'm posting this because it's not handwaving or airy speculation, it's actual data, of which there seems to be something of a shortage."

Of course she does do some airy speculation on what e-book readers (the people) tend to be like, but oh, well. It sounds as though she got emails from an unfortunate cross-section of them.

thanks for the link

[walkitout]

In the course of doing other research, I stumbled across this. Initially, I thought this might be Jon Konrath, but alas, it was not.

http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2009/10/kindle-numbers-traditional-publishing.html

I don't know a thing about him or his books, but that's a lot of data right there, and it suggests that if books move to e-readers for cheap, cheap, cheap, some non-bestseller authors will still be doing better than flipping burgers.

Re: thanks for the link

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Yikes. This bit made my blood run a little chill: "Kindle does the formatting, and it's free. I do my own editing, though my peers also read my manuscripts and offer their input, and a genius named Sue spots my typos for me."

Re: thanks for the link

[walkitout]

Makes your blood run chill because of all those people put out of work? Because of the likely drop in quality (altho I've sure seen some appalling typos/grammar-os make it through the pros)? Because anybody can now get the same treatment you normally have to become a mega-bestseller to get? That is, your work survives the publishing process almost untouched by the hands/pens/pencils of others? I tried _very_ hard to make that sound neutral, but I'm pretty sure that most people would have strong opinions about it.

Re: thanks for the link

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I was thinking mainly of the awful things people have said about the automatic Kindle formatting. I would have no beef with a program that really did the formatting well.