So I'm sitting here with the Sunday paper actually spread out on the kitchen table, which almost never happens anymore, and there's this full-page ad in the Book Review section that stopped me mid-coffee. It's from a group calling itself Authors United, organized mostly by the thriller writer Douglas Preston, and it's basically an open letter to Amazon customers begging Amazon to stop what it's doing to Hachette authors while the two companies fight over ebook pricing terms.
Nearly a thousand writers signed the thing. Stephen King's name is on it. So is John Grisham's, and Malcolm Gladwell's, and Ursula K. Le Guin's, and a pile of others I recognize and a bunch I don't. The gist: Amazon has spent months slow-walking Hachette titles (delayed shipping estimates, no pre-order buttons, "temporarily out of stock" on books that are absolutely not out of stock) as leverage in a contract negotiation that has nothing to do with the authors themselves, and the letter argues those authors are the ones actually getting hurt while Amazon and Hachette execs sort out margins in a room somewhere.
I've read a hundred posts this summer about the Amazon/Hachette fight and honestly most of them blur together at this point, so I don't want to just recap the whole saga here, everyone doing tech blogging has already done that to death. What got me is the format. A full-page New York Times ad, in 2014, from a coalition of authors, feels like a move from about thirty years ago. Somebody had to actually write copy, get thirty-plus signatures worth of names cleared, and pay what I'd guess is somewhere in the six figures for the placement. In an era where you could organize the exact same open letter as a Medium post and a hashtag and get it in front of more eyeballs for free by Tuesday, they went print. That's either a very savvy read on who they're trying to reach (older readers, industry folks, people who still subscribe to the physical Times) or it's a little bit of theater aimed at Amazon's own PR department more than at actual customers. Possibly both.
My honest opinion, and I know this puts me on one side of a fight I don't have a direct stake in: I buy a stupid amount of ebooks on my Kindle, probably averaging two or three a month, and I don't love that a company I give that much money to is using my convenience as a lever against publishers. But I also don't fully buy the framing that Amazon is some uniquely villainous actor here. Publishers have spent decades treating authors like the last line item that matters, agency pricing helped keep ebook prices artificially propped up for years, and now that Amazon has the negotiating leverage everyone's suddenly very concerned about author welfare. It's messier than a full-page ad can capture. Ads by design are not messy, they're a clean story with a villain, and that's kind of the whole problem with taking a negotiating dispute and turning it into a morality play in the Sunday paper.
What I do think is genuinely true, no hedging on this part: whatever leverage tactic Amazon is using, deliberately screwing with pre-order buttons and shipping estimates on specific books to pressure a publisher is a rotten way to treat the writers who had zero say in the contract terms. If you wrote a book that happens to be published by Hachette right now, you're getting squeezed for a fight you're not even part of, and no amount of "well this is just business" makes that feel great. Authors United isn't wrong about that part even if I think the letter oversimplifies everything around it.
Anyway. I don't think one newspaper ad moves Amazon an inch, they've been perfectly comfortable absorbing bad press over this since spring. But it's a decent snapshot of just how much this dispute has bled out past the publishing trade press and into a full-on public fight with actual celebrity authors as the foot soldiers. Curious whether Amazon even bothers responding directly or just lets it wash past. My guess, knowing how these things usually go, is a vague statement from a spokesperson sometime this week and nothing that actually changes.
Also, small unrelated complaint while I have the paper open: does anyone else find the Sunday Review section impossible to fold back up once you've read it once? Mine looks like it went through a wood chipper.