amazon – Alex Acks: Sound and Nerdery

As with so many blog posts, it begins thus:

Storify: accomplished. Pissy blog post: engaged.

I haven’t made a big deal out of the Amazon v Hachette thing mostly because I do not have a LOOK HOW HUGE MY SALES ARE WHY ARE YOU NOT IMPRESSED BY THE SIZE OF MY SALES FIGURES BOW DOWN BEFORE ME dong to wave around, but back when the Authors United thing got started, I signed on to the first letter. Because I’m a ~~slave to a corrupt and terrible system~~ ~~spineless sheeple~~ ~~teetotaler when it comes to Amazon kool-aide~~ fucking human being who can make my own decisions, thanks. My reasoning is not the point of this blog post. (Really, just go read this thing Scalzi wrote or this thing Chuck Wendig wrote and basically yeah, what they said.)

The point of this post is why I ended up asking to have my name taken off the most recent Authors United letter. The letter you now see there is actually not the letter as originally conceived, which is what I read when I said no, thanks, I don’t want to be on this any more. However, after reading this new version, I still don’t agree, and I don’t put my name on letters with which I have disagreements.

The original point of contention was this line here:

Amazon has every right to refuse to sell consumer goods in response to a pricing disagreement with a wholesaler. We all appreciate discounted razor blades and cheaper shoes. But books are not consumer goods. Books cannot be written more cheaply, nor can authors be outsourced to China. Books are not toasters or televisions. Each book is the unique, quirky creation of a lonely, intense, and often expensive struggle on the part of a single individual, a person whose living depends on that book finding readers. This is the process Amazon is obstructing.

Which has been replaced with:

Amazon has every right to refuse to sell consumer goods in response to a pricing disagreement with a wholesaler. But books are not mere consumer goods. Books cannot be written more cheaply, nor can authors be outsourced to another country. Books are not toasters or televisions. Each book is the unique, quirky creation of a lonely, intense, and often expensive struggle on the part of a single individual, a person whose living depends on his or her book finding readers. This is the process Amazon endangers when it uses its tremendous power to separate authors from their readership.

Courtney Milan wrote an excellent blog post about the yick factor of the original paragraph. And basically: word, sister. Her post was actually what prompted me to go and read the letter carefully in time and ask to have my name removed.

Though I do want to be clear here, that while Douglas Preston and I obviously have some disagreements (upon which I will expound shortly) he is operating very much on the up and up on this thing. He sent everyone involved an e-mail with a link to the proposed letter in it so we could give feedback and ask to have our names taken off if we wished, and when I responded negatively to him he was very polite and didn’t fight me. I’m just such a lazy piece of shit I wouldn’t have gotten around to reading the letter if I hadn’t seen someone else set their trousers on fire first and gone huh, I should probably look in to this.

Shame on me.

Anyway, while I think the new draft of the letter is better, I still don’t agree with it, and I’m glad I asked to have my name taken off. My problem stems from the entire argument that books are not mere consumer goods because of the artistic struggle of the writer. (I’m also not a fan of that outsourcing writing to another country comment for reasons mentioned in Courtney’s post, even if we’re no longer specifically throwing shade at China.)

Now, trust me. I don’t for a second buy bullshit arguments that posit forcing book prices lower will cause people to buy more books. You know what’s stopping me from buying new books? Not having the time to read the ones I already own. I’m not going to consider two $9.99 ebooks interchangeable because they both have unicorns on the cover; they won’t be the same book. And let’s not forget that authors have followings; I’ll run out and buy something by Naomi Novik because I’ve read and liked her other books; I’m not going to pick up something with a dragon in the description just because it’s cheaper.

So books are arguably consumer goods that might resist quite the same models as toasters and candy bars, but they are still consumer goods. Writers, editors, and manufacturers produce the books so that consumers can buy them and read them. And we sure want to market them like they’re consumer goods, don’t we? It’s capitalism, man. Charge what the market will bear.

Arguing to a retail company that books should get some kind of free pass from their shitty, strong-arm tactics because books are special, artistic butterflies? You’re kidding me, right? Courtney Milan made this point in her post already, and better than I could, I think. I’ll just say in short that I think making a non-economic argument at a company that is acting purely out of economic self-interest (no matter what it claims) is a weak position that we’re ill-served by. And kind of makes us sound like assholes, besides. While I think art holds a unique and important place in culture, I’m really not comfortable trying to justify special treatment for books on the backs of the toaster makers. We all deserve to make a fair wage for our labor, whether we’re slapping “hamburgers” together behind the counter at McD’s or writing the Most Important And Transformative Novel Of This Century, and I will not support tacitly abandoning other workers under the suspiciously ego-wanky notion that my skill is way more special.

Anyway if you signed on to the original letter, make sure you read this one and see if you agree with it. It’s important, man. That’s your name on it. (And hey, if you read it and agree with Douglas where I disagree and are a published writer who hasn’t signed on to it, I’m sure he’d like to hear from you.)

I actually want to step past the entire Amazon/Authors United thing and address a much bigger issue, because this is really just another episode in the ongoing adventures of oh hey look we’re getting fucked by corporations again.

Being an artist in a capitalism-obsessed society like America kind of blows. Or really, no kind of about it. It blows. Even producing commercially viable art isn’t any guarantee of being able to make a steady living without a side job, and that makes it a hell of a lot harder to practice one’s craft. But frankly, appealing to the better natures of companies is not the way to fix this. Companies, with rare exception, don’t have better natures.

Now, I’m fond of pointing out that companies are composed of people, and run by people, and excusing corporate malfeasance by shrugging it off as “hey it’s a corporation, what do you expect?” is accepting the most banal sort of evil as part of life. We should expect more from our fellow humans. And hey, we know that it’s possible to have a successful company that doesn’t act like it’s run by total shitlords. (Hello, Ben & Jerry’s.)

Shrugging off corporate evil indicates a profound lack of responsibility and vision for society. It indicates either a conviction of helplessness or an unwillingness to expect better out of ourselves. But you know what? So does expecting corporations to fix our problems our of the goodness of their non-existent hearts. I don’t want to live in a world where corporations are our social conscience.

Capitalism is arguably one of the motors that run our society. But it’s not some kind of miraculous fix-all, and every time a politician (or anyone else) talks about how the magic of the free market is going to swoop in and save us (presumably while riding pillion on a unicorn with Jesus) I just really want to scream. And flip tables. And bite things. We’re not here to serve capitalism. It’s supposed to serve us, and we managed to lose sight of that somewhere along the way.

The real problem here is that we as a society treat artists like shit, and art like it’s widgets, and scorn what is ultimately skilled and important labor. Then those values get reflected back to us by the economy we supposedly own and we go wow that’s ugly could you please not?

Artists aren’t the only profession that gets offered either the shitty end of the stick or no end at all. We don’t even value what we claim to value, or else teachers, soldiers, and artists wouldn’t need government and community assistance in order to survive. Somewhere along the way we allowed ourselves to be convinced that there is such a thing as a person who does not deserve to make a living wage, no matter what their profession.

Companies are not going to value us or our work as long as we treat it as a thing without value. This is our problem to solve, because we let this happen. When corporations shit on people, that’s not because they’re corporations and that’s just what they do. It’s because we’re too fucking cowardly and blind as a society to smack them with a rolled up newspaper and say NO. And asking a corporation nicely to please just stop shitting on people is like asking the doberman with diarrhea to kindly not poop on your rug.

We claim that science is important, creativity is important, that teachers are important, that soldiers are important, and they are. Art is important too. Art is the heart of our society. It’s time we started acting like it instead of effectively praying to Zeus for help and hoping he kisses us before he fucks us and ruins our lives.

HWA wrote an open letter to Jeff Bezos requesting to change the way Amazon reviews work. (ETA: Whoops, URL for that link was borked, it’s now fixed, sorry about that!)

In our view, beyond profanity and spitefulness, an inappropriate review would be one that:

indicates the customer has not read the book, but only a small portion of it, such as a free electronic sample;

includes spoilers which, once revealed, could significantly reduce interest in the work;

includes negative personal remarks about the author; and/or

is focused on the work’s price rather than its content.

As a writer I admittedly have almost zero (but not quite zero!) reviews on Amazon, so I’m kind of at the career point where I just wish people would acknowledge that I exist and have, you know, written stuff at all. I do have a single two star review, which I will treasure forever and ever because it’s beautiful and made me giggle. I also admittedly don’t tend to use Amazon reviews too much when it comes to buying reading material; most everything I pick up, it’s because a friend recommended it to me. Probably because I don’t read nearly as much as I should. So I honestly have no idea if the Amazon review system is the sort of wretched hive of scum and villainy we’re used to seeing at, say, Youtube.

All that in mind, eh. I feel like the above points could be argued one way or the other, but would also need to be better defined.

What constitutes a spoiler? I have friends that are allergic to spoilers to the point of near melodrama, who might count mentioning any plot point or character development at all as spoilers–which sure makes writing a meaningful review difficult. Personally, I like spoilers, since with rare exception it doesn’t hurt my enjoyment of a film or book, and I kind of like to know if the wheels come off the bus in the third act and I’m just going to end up pissed off because it was all just a ~~massive copout~~ dream.

What constitutes a negative personal remark? Obviously, “you shouldn’t buy this book because the author is ugly” or even “you shouldn’t buy this book because I think ~~Orson Scott Card~~ the author is a terrible human being” would be personal remarks. But what about criticisms of the writer’s style? Complaints that the writer really needs an editor or seems way too in love with one of her heroes? I wouldn’t count those as personal, but I’ve sure seen some writers take such comments very personally.

Isn’t price a valid factor? I feel like “I liked this book all right but it sure wasn’t worth the $25 I shelled out for it” is a very valid criticism.

And so on. On a lot of these, your mileage may vary. To be honest, a lot of the issues brought up in the HWA letter really sound to me like they could be solved if Amazon just enforced its existing policies better. And maybe added a “flag as inappropriate” button or something. You can already comment on reviews and rate them as helpful or not. I’d argue the rest of the slack could probably be picked up by better moderation, but whatever.

Where I do come to a screeching halt on this letter is:

We recommend that Amazon strengthen its customer review policy to address the above issues and also require customers reveal their actual identity, which removes the cover of anonymity that enables trolling and the ability to simple re-enter the system under a new identity once banned.

Emphasis mine.

To be clear, the anonymity they’re complaining about still requires that people sign in under an Amazon account (one that has successfully completed at least one purchase) in order to post a review to begin with. So yes, sock puppet accounts can be an issue, but the real point here is that there is an identity that a review is attached to, and there is a trail that can hopefully be followed in the event of actual harassment.

What kind of blows me away on second reading here is actually the complete naiveté displayed by the notion that this is actually some kind of solution. To sign up for an Amazon account, literally all you need is A name (which need not even be real) and an e-mail address. That’s why it’s possible to create sock puppet accounts to begin with. Amazon doesn’t exactly check your state issued ID when you sign up. Requiring people to reveal their full names/real names is not in any way going to prevent sock puppet accounts.

I’m honestly not a fan of true anonymity when it comes to comment systems; I actually do want there to be some kind of account involved just so you can at least feel like there’s someone you can respond to, which also allows for banning and potentially provides a trail to follow if things escalate to harassment. Yes, that kind of thing still allows trolls to make sock puppet accounts, but let’s be honest–if someone is that determined to be an asshole and has that much time on their hands, they’re going to find a way to do it.

I’ve had way too many friends who have been harassed because they’ve had their real names found out. Sometimes it’s because their name has revealed their gender or ethnicity and opened them up to really nasty personal attacks. People with really uncommon names can easily have their personal details searched out. And in the age of companies googling their potential employees as a matter of course, I can’t help but think this could really hurt the ability of certain genres (particularly LGBT books and erotica, but even certain kinds of horror) to get reviews.

To be clear, we are not asking for a policy that ensures only positive reviews. We are asking for a policy that focuses reviews on content and helps to eliminate public harassment of Amazon’s partners.

The way to eliminate public harassment is with better moderation. And while the aim may not be to ensure only positive reviews, you’re kidding yourself if you think this wouldn’t have a chilling effect. Particularly when we’re talking about the work of relatively well known authors who have a loyal fan following, or ones who have been known to go after people who write negative reviews.

When authors complain about remarks that cross the line, they are often told by Amazon to engage the customer directly. The author never wins these confrontations; instead, engaging with anonymous people who are exhibiting trolling behavior only hurts the author him/herself.

Yeah, no shit. This is why rule number one of the internet is “don’t feed the trolls” and “don’t respond to reviews” should really be somewhere in the top ten rules for all writers.

If a writer is being harassed, that is a problem, and that needs to be dealt with using stricter moderation. (And potentially even bringing in law enforcement if harassment has hit the point of threats, etc.) But frankly, the majority of what I’ve seen in regards to negative reviews hasn’t been about harassment; it’s been about someone not liking the writer’s work, and the writer taking umbrage.

I get it, I really do. It sucks when faceless people are saying mean things about you. I’ve had that happen to me in my personal life before, and it feels bad, man. But at the same time, this is the price of admission. No one is required to like what we write, let alone be kind about it. And the reviews aren’t for us to begin with.

The onus isn’t on reviewers to be nice; it’s on us to be graceful when they aren’t.