The old fortune cookie joke used to be “Help, I am being held captive by the Hong Kong Noodle Company!”
Like it or not, most of those who buy it will do so through him. Amazon’s control of the book market is almost beyond comprehension, especially to this admittedly now senior citizen who published his first book back in a hard-to-believe 1968.
I started by writing exclusively fiction and screenplays, but over the years events with which we are all familiar propelled me into non-fiction, writing more articles than I can count or even remember, from what I intended to be serious political commentary to tour guides of Los Angeles for the defunct, since the airline itself is defunct, TWA Magazine. (I see they’re selling them on eBay as collector’s items.)
It’s been a long road with the usual ups and downs. I don’t regret any of it, because I was able to make a living and get other more important rewards from what I wanted to do from roughly age 16. I feel extremely lucky and grateful for that.
He also essentially controls the reviewing of books via his comments section.
In the old days, many newspapers had separate book review sections. Like many authors, I wrote reviews, largely of mysteries, for a number of them—Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News.
All are gone now, except the New York Times Book Review, for which I also wrote, and which reviewed my books favorably, until I came out as conservative. Now, they don’t review them at all.
But, as I said, there’s a good part to this.
The Amazon comments on books by (mostly) actual readers are in many ways more interesting and valuable—I suspect a preponderance of good ones drives a lot of sales—than those by fancy reviewers whose own credits appear, importantly, at the end of their reviews.
Their self-aggrandizing mini-bio at the end—“Mr. Hasenpfeffer’s recent novel, ‘Hare Raising,’ short-listed for the Conejo-Lapin Prix de la Littérature, is available at ... etc.”—is the hidden impetus to write the review. Newspapers never paid much for the actual article in the first place.
(I have been guilty of that myself. In fact, I’m doing it in a sense now. But it’s my publication day. What else can I do? Tell you the book is good? I think it is, but, ultimately, you’ll be the judge of that anyway.)
Further, Amazon is amazingly convenient for buying books of all descriptions and finding old ones of favorite authors. It’s almost too easy—hence the gradual disappearance of the bookstore.
One can assume Mr. Bezos himself was a book lover since he’s said to have started his leviathan company selling books out of the trunk of his car.
Could he, in his wildest imagination, ever have thought from those humble beginnings, assuming the truth of the story, he would be employing over a million and a half people, be the owner of a $500 million megayacht, not to mention a $65 million jet, an $80 million New York penthouse, a space exploration company, and who knows what else?
He’s the very model of a modern major oligarch ... off, originally, of all things, books!
Not writing them, of course, but exploiting them until he could exploit virtually everything else.
I don’t like this just as I don’t like those other oligarchs, all too willing to destroy civilization for their own gain, almost all of whom come from Big Tech and Big Pharma (Mr. Bezos is in tech, too).
But like it or not, here I am his slave, up to a point. It’s our modern condition. Compromises at every turn. We all, or the vast majority of us, make them. I have great respect for those few who don’t.
I may be off Twitter/X because they banned me. And I basically ignore Facebook and Instagram. I don’t use PayPal since I heard they were banning people for political reasons. And sometimes, when not in use, I remember to turn off my iPhone.
But I’m on Amazon, alas. It’s my business.
Still, I can make these pledges if you purchase my book there. It isn’t a product of China, like so much on Amazon, not even the printing. And all mentions of the Chinese Communist Party, as well as the World Economic Forum, on its pages are negative.
Sorry about that.
