The group, Rarefied Artists for Personal Excess, argue that an artist’s body of work, and their cultural impact, should always be taken into account when determining the relative severity of any felony the artist might commit in the pursuit of art.

“An artist, whether with the pen, the brush, the chisel, or the camera, can bring joy, understanding and even enlightenment to millions of ordinary people,” said group President Joseph Noblart. “Why, then should we allow them to be undone because of the harm inflicted by the artist on one, or even a few ordinary people?”

Noblart, a renowned painter whose work “The Tears of Sade” was widely regarded as acceptable justification for his attempted assassination of former French President François Mitterrand, argued that many of Polanski’s films had made significant cultural contributions. “Chinatown, for example, is a masterpiece, the apogee of its genre. That film alone should justify an interjurisdictional crime spree. Taken as part of his overall legacy, Polanski should feel free to torch an orphanage with total impunity.”

The group of mostly European artists has lobbied in the past for legislation to excuse artists for crimes based on their creative achievements. “We need a codified system to overlook felonious behaviour, past or future,” continued Noblart. “A painter should be able to celebrate his or her first public exhibition by robbing a convenience store, or beating the shit out of a wino. Winning a prestigious award, like the Booker or an Oscar, should confer the right to cold-bloodedly murder an individual. Many of our members have already exercised this right.”

Noblart also urged prosecutors to consider an artist’s failures as time served. “During the time that he would likely have been incarcerated, Polanski made Pirates, with Walter Matthau. Is that not punishment enough?”

Many co-signatories to the statement expressed concern that Polanski was being made a scapegoat for the unpunished crimes of all artists. “Roman’s being unfairly castigated for the climate of violent, drug-fuelled sexual hedonism that has pervaded filmmaking in Europe and America since the 1920’s,” said film producer Herbert von Krolock, who has worked with Polanski in the past. “Everyone who’s ever been able to prove they were sexually abused by a director and survived got a nice out-of-court settlement or a juicy acting role, so who’s the victim? So a few people suffer unspeakable indignities along the way — if the movie wins awards or turns a profit, who really gives a crap?”

Other artists have criticised the group’s stance. “This issue is not about whether or not a particular filmmaker deserves to be forgiven for raping a child and fleeing prosecution because he went on to make some good films, because when you put it like that, it sounds utterly indefensible,” said Sondra Walker, author of The Prostitution of Values. “No, the real issue here is that we, the intelligentsia, loathe middle America so much, we’d rather a paedophile go free than let a person who speaks French spend a day in your jails.”

Stephen Jayson Harris has interviewed Roman Polanksi several times for American Penitentiary magazine. He is writing a book about artists who tragically commit serious offences before they become famous.

“Some [submissions] are only just over 50,000 words, and one was exactly 50,000. Another had ‘done for the day’ every 1,600-1,700 words.”

“I don’t know where all this is coming from,” said one editor who wished to remain anonymous and employed. “By Wednesday, my email Inbox looked like I’d somehow subscribed to a live submission feed from BookSurge or Lulu. By Friday, the mail was stacked up floor to ceiling in the hallway outside the company offices. With the financial crisis, we can’t even afford to feed our interns, so I’m stuck going through the slush. And all of it seems so … unpolished, like a first draft, like they’d just finished writing it the day before. Who’s writing all this stuff, and why are they sending it to me, and why now? Why does the end of November always mean a deluge of crap?”

An anonymous literary agent agreed: “Most of the submissions I’ve received this this week are too short to be contemporary novels. Some are only just over 50,000 words, and one I got via email was exactly 50,000, cutting off mid-sentence. Another one had ‘done for the day’ or something about going to bed every 1,600 to 1,700 words or so. It’s a lucky standout that even has an introductory paragraph before the opening. Tell you what, though: judging by the subject matter of these submissions, poor is the new cancer.”

Barry Lyndon, editor of poetry journal The Contented Dodo, reported that he received over a thousand submissions during the week. “We usually get seven or eight. Twelve is a busy week, and that includes responses to funding requests. I think we might have opened the floodgates by amending our submission criteria to include ‘prose poems’, but really, none of the submissions I glanced at even mentioned dodos, and each issue of TCD only runs about 5,000 words. Someone would’ve had to write the Divine Comedy of dodo poems for us to dedicate ten issues to it.”

One literary professional interviewed was upbeat about the situation: Edwin Drood, editor of online literary journal The Unconscious Novella, said: “This spike in submissions is wonderful. We have enough material to publish a randomly chosen novella every day for the next decade. We can’t pay contributors, of course, but you can tell these submissions weren’t written with real publication in mind.”

Stephen Jayson Harris covered the publishing industry for What Fish is That? magazine until he was laid off in September. He now works as a bouncer at a Starbucks establishment, and is writing a book about the upcoming death of publishing.

• NaProMo
  National Procrastination Month is by far the largest community challenge project, with participants throughout the world (though most participants don’t even bother signing up). All you have to do is put off whatever you can put off, until at least the beginning of December. It’s also the oldest community challenge, predating NaNoWriMo by millennia. In fact, recorded history began when an ancient participant failed the challenge.
• NaMoGroMo
  National Moustache Growing Month, otherwise known as Movember, challenges participants to let the mo gro. Women are encouraged to participate.
• NaNoMoMo
  National No Moustache Month challenges the partners of NaMoGroMo participants to convince them to shave the mo.
• NaNaGaMo
  National Navel Gazing Month invites participants to ponder, mull, ruminate or philosophise over an existential, theoretical or theological question, for the entire month. Extra points are given if the participant:
  • Achieves nothing else in the month, except basic maintenance of their earthly vessel
  • Is able to convince someone else to take care of the basic maintenance of their earthly vessel
  • Frequently refers to the work of an earlier philosopher they’ve read
  • Frequently refers to the work of an earlier philosopher they haven’t read
  • Spends the month arguing the same point with the same person, to no conclusion
  • Ends the month with exactly the same opinion
• NaPerMeMo
  National Perpetuate a Meme Month invites participants to spread Internet memes, via blogs, emails, IMs, and particularly by describing them to others in person. Extra points are given if:
  • The meme is more than a year old
  • The participant doesn’t check other sources to see if the meme is pure bullshit
  • The participant creates their own derivative example of an existing meme (such as their own Lolcatz photo, or Demotivator)
• NaTeYoFriYoPlaMo
  National Tell Your Friends Your Plans Month is very popular amongst young people, especially college students. Participants are encouraged to tell their friends what they plan to achieve in in the short and long term. Extra points are awarded if the plans require extraordinary serendipity, divine intervention, or a suspension of the fundamental laws of the universe. Bonus points are awarded for returning participants if they haven’t achieved any of their plans from the previous year, and if they have all new plans this year.
• NaWhiAboDePubMo
  National Whine About the Death of Publishing Month encourages participants to engage in lengthy discussions about how publishing is going to hell in a handbasket, and to make predictions about when the industry will collapse and society will abandon reading altogether. Now in its 400th year! Extra points are given if the participant:
  • Uses the example of a bestselling book they think is bad as evidence that human civilisation is on the verge of self-destruction
  • Uses their own failure as a writer as evidence that the publishing industry doesn’t know literature from a pile of manure wrapped in a tabloid
  • Fails to see the irony in their refusal to buy any more books until the industry lifts its game
• InIOToLiAmAgMo
  International It’s Ok To Like Americans Again Month launched only this year – November 4, to be exact – and already it has millions of signups worldwide. Participants are encouraged to openly discuss American politics without shaking their heads in disbelief, to see American movies, read American books and listen to American music without feeling ashamed, and to give American tourists the opportunity to prove themselves to be boorish assholes, instead of simply assuming it.
• NaNaNaNa-NaNa-NaMo
  National Sing Along Without Knowing the Words Month – If you get through an entire song without anyone noticing, you win. You’ve been participating for years.
• NaIDoThiThaFuMo
  National I Don’t Think That’s Funny Month challenges participants to write to so-called satirists and comedians, and explain exactly why their brand of humour is wrong, illogical, unacceptable, dangerous to children and generally devoid of value or place in civilised society. Extra points are given if the participant:
  • demonstrates a complete misunderstanding of the concept of satire or comedy
  • reacts as if the piece was intended seriously, and refuses to back down when they discover it wasn’t
  • insists that the benchmark for publication should be whether the participant thinks it’s funny
  • insists that satire is only clever or funny when it’s obvious or clearly labelled that it’s satire
  • insists that anyone who finds humour in the piece must be just as mentally retarded as the author
  • gives examples of other satirists or comedians they do understand in order to prove that the author isn’t funny
  • attempts to give their own examples of what satire or comedy really is in order to prove that the author isn’t funny
  • uses the word “sorry” sarcastically
  • claims to support the right to free speech while insisting that the author must voluntarily relinquish this right
  • threatens an organised boycott amongst the seven people they know
  • threatens physical violence upon the author, should they happen to wander into the participant’s basement
  • Complains anonymously, especially if doing so in a blog or forum the author will surely never read

Some of the challenges that didn’t make the Top Ten:

• NaBuSewMo — National Button Sewing Month
• NaCroSoMo — National Crossword Solving Month
• NaSoKniMo — National Sock Knitting Month
• NaRhiNoMo — National Rhinoceros Month (If you see a rhino, you win. Very popular in Africa.)
• NaQuiPoOnYoBloMo — National Quit Posting On Your Blog Month
• NaCompAboBroIncoMo – National Complain About Browser Incompatibilities Month
• NaFaSoLaTiDohMo — National Scales Singing Month

November is also NaCreYoOwNaNoJoMo — National Create Your Own NaNoWriMo Joke Month. Please feel free to post your own contributions in the comments below. Extra points if your entry is vaguely pronounceable.

(This year, I’m going undercover as a NaNo participant, to see what havoc I can wreak upon the enterprise from within. If you want to help, sign up to NaNo then post a random number as your daily wordcount. Even better, keep posting zero! With your help, we can achieve our goal of reducing their average wordcount by a digit.)

To counter the unbelievable surge in temporary motivation that NaNo causes, November needs 2 new Demotivators:

NaNoWriMo
Almost as challenging as solving 500 crosswords,
and almost as rewarding.

click for larger version (widescreen)

Photo by Jane Sawyer, of MorgueFile.

NaNoWriMo
It’s all fun and games until you expect someone else to read it.

click for larger version (widescreen)

Photo by Andrea Church, of MorgueFile.

And if that’s not enough to dissuade you, check out last year’s 2 November Demotivators as well.

An optimist would say that the 21st Century began on November 4, 2008, when the United States of America finally said No to the politics of Old White Men. I have four children now, the youngest about 20 months old, and by the time she is old enough to understand such things, she will probably not believe there was a time when people thought America “wasn’t ready” for a President who wasn’t an Old White Man.

The war in Iraq will end, eventually, and the spectre we call Al Qaeda will fade and be replaced by another shadowy fear. But we will never return to the old 20th Century mindset, of passive racism justified by resignation.

Hopefully this will also see the long-overdue mainstreaming of “black” literature, and mark the end of the Magic Negro cliche in fiction.

Note: The LA Times’ David Ehrenstein argued, back in March 2007, that Barack Obama is America’s Magic Negro. It’s depressing to think he may be right, but after the first four years of his presidency it won’t matter.

Of course, a technophile might suggest that the 21st Century began on December 15, 1994, when Netscape Navigator 1.0 was released and the promise of the Internet began to be realised. And there is bound to be a nitwit with no poetry in their soul who claims that the 21st Century began on January 1, 2000 (and a truly pedantic nitwit still clinging to the mathematically correct notion that it started on January 1, 2001).

It is my sincere, but faint, hope that between now and his Inauguration, Barack Obama takes the time to visit Saturday Night Live, and give this speech:

click for larger version (widescreen)

Photo by Stephanie, of MorgueFile.

click for larger version (widescreen)

Photo by Scott Liddell, of MorgueFile.

Sean Lindsay
For the last four months Sean has been involved in a long-term study on the effects of not writing, conducted by social scientists at the University of Helsinki, Literary Psychology School. Though it is too early to discuss specifics, the results are encouraging, and it seems possible at this stage that former writers may be able to successfully transition back into mainstream society.

Paul Riddell
Though rejected as a subject in the same study, Paul Riddell has ceased writing on his own. He has eliminated writing in every form from his life — no blog, no books, no keyboard on his computer, no text messaging, no post-it notes. He only communicates orally, and even then only with people he isn’t tempted to punch in the mouth. He is presently working in plant genetics research, attempting to develop a gene therapy that will make trees impervious to woodchipping and pulping.

Stephen Jayson Harris
Stephen Harris recently resigned from his position as Books Editor for the Boise Gleaner, after the Books section was reduced from a quarter-page at the back of the International Finance section, down to a column heading in the Classifieds. He is suing the newspaper to regain rights to the backlog of book-related articles they’ve refused to publish, while covering the McCain campaign for New England Prose Poetry magazine.

Edgar Harris
It’s finally been conclusively proven that Edgar Harris, former sports editor for Science Fiction Age, never actually existed. “Edgar Harris” was the collective pseudonym used by a group of freelance writers who felt their science fiction sports coverage wasn’t being taken seriously by the Peabody panel. The group disbanded in 2002, leaving the “Edgar Harris” moniker to be abused by domain name squatters.

Sir Thomas DeKay
Having decided to update his resume, Sir Thomas has been diligently studying modern computing via the For Dummies book series (he is presently reading eBay PowerSeller Business Practices For Dummies). He expects to be able to post his own articles on this website, when he gets to Wordpress for Dummies. His latest volume of poetry, Inspired by The Predictions of the Death of Print, is seeking a publisher.

New York – One of the most onerous tasks in the magazine and book trade is the sifting of the slush pile. Slush piles, the collection of unsolicited and unagented manuscripts sent to publishers by beginning or would-be authors, are sometimes the source of future literary successes, but more often than not are the source of headaches and indigestion. Many editors privately complain and scream about the uselessness of slush piles, but fearing a backlash from beginning writers who already assume conspiracies keep their work from being printed, very few speak out about the quality and quantity of the material received.

With this in mind, the international literary community announced a special amnesty day for those long-suffering editors forced to sift through manuscripts where everything but the name of the author was misspelled on the title page. April 31, 2002 marks International Slushpile Bonfire Day, where editors and publishers are encouraged to collect all of the unreadable or unusable manuscripts that have built up in their offices, in some cases since 1968, and burn them while drinking wine and singing songs. Since one of the worst offenders is the science fiction / fantasy / horror triumvirate, SF, fantasy, and horror editors are allowed to place the first documents and light the pile when complete.

New York editors gather for Slushpile Bonfire Day

"We’re burning everything," said Pablo Redondo, the organizer of the event and the only editor willing to appear on television. "All of the manuscripts with no merit other than the tag ‘Member, SFWA"’ on the cover page. The manuscripts where the author didn’t bother to read the submission guidelines and dumped off the copy to a magazine that doesn’t buy that sort of fiction, or doesn’t buy fiction at all. The manuscripts where the author already registered the story for a copyright ‘to keep editors from stealing their work’. The Wesley / Worf slash fanfiction sent in ‘just in case we had an interest.’ The manuscripts sent in on toilet paper or on Hello Kitty note paper, and the manuscripts sent with death threats against any editor who plans to reject it, and the 3000-page ’sequels’ to popular books written because the author didn’t like how the original ended. We’re making a big pile in the middle of Times Square, and every editor with a slush pile is invited to pitch in. Big magazines, small book lines, Webzines, rantzines, and weekly newspapers: every editor in the world is welcome to start the healing here."

In return, the rest of the publishing community will protect the identity of the participants in the bonfire and blame the disappearance of the manuscripts on the Postal Service. "After all, they were all contaminated with . . . um . . . anthrax!" said Redondo. "That’s right: anthrax and Dutch Elm Blight! Maybe a bit of tobacco mosaic and some cane toad venom, but anthrax was definitely involved somewhere. Of course, considering the number of manuscripts we’ve received with any number of bodily fluids all over the envelope, nobody will be surprised in the slightest."

If this seems a bit extreme, the words of an editor who wished to remain nameless explained the situation. "We’re constantly reading in Locus or Speculations about the bad editors who take more than a week to accept or reject a story or novel, but these people don’t know what it’s like. An intern who takes eight weeks to reject a story is most likely needing that eight weeks to recover from jamming a set of ten Lee Press-on Nails in her eyes. By the time she’s able to see again, that same author may have sent another eight to ten stories to the slush pile, and the cycle begins again. Even at our best, we can only afford to publish three short stories and a novella a month, which means we publish a grand total of 36 short stories a year, and we get eight to ten THOUSAND manuscripts a month. This is the only way we can keep up with the overload without going insane and shooting at school buses once we got off work.

"Let’s put it another way," the editor continued. "I hear from one writer who suggests that because of the delay in response to his submissions, we call out HAZMAT teams to pluck his envelopes out of the incoming mail and decontaminate them before opening them. I can’t bring myself to tell him that we can’t afford a HAZMAT team, and each and every one of his stories makes me scrub my arms with carbolic acid whenever I open it. Each one of his stories literally takes away my will to live, and I shudder every time I see his return address on an envelope. And he’s one of hundreds out there, maybe thousands. I have to buy elbow-length rubber gloves on credit just to keep up."

Electronic manuscripts are no exception. "Since the advent of the Web, we’ve been receiving material from people who apparently learned to type by throwing their cats at the keyboard, and some of it is so horrible that we don’t let it dare escape," said Redondo. "Some of it is so foul that we’ve decided to include hard drives in the bonfire, because any hard drive or mail server that contained that story is obviously too contaminated for future use. The New York Fire Department had problems with this at first due to environmental issues, but when we explained the evil that would be removed from the universe by its extirpation, they understood."

An unsolicited submission is thrown on the fire

Surprisingly, no news of this action appeared in any of the journals dedicated to collecting existing and new writing markets, such as Writer’s Digest, The Writer, The Gila Queen’s Guide To Markets, and the innumerable Web sites cataloguing every market that pays in money, credit, advertising space, or raw meat still on the bone. Redondo said that this was deliberate. "The only publication that contained details was the American Editor’s Association newsletter Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash, and anyone who leaked the details to the general public was to be appointed the person in charge of dealing with the repercussions. I myself am going into hiding in New Zealand after this, and I’m not returning to work until after I’ve had extensive cosmetic surgery."

The response from the beginning writer community was, as expected, swift and terrible. A representative of the Eltingville (New Jersey) Science Fiction Writer’s Circle and Costuming Guild released a statement that read, in part, "We decry any efforts to rid the world of our works, and the ESFWC&CG will start up a GeoCities site to hold all of these orphaned stories until the New York literary establishment comes to its senses and buys them back for their full value." When the representative was contacted and asked whether starting up a magazine or book line might be of more value than lambasting the existing editors, the response was "Of course not. They’re supposed to pay us for our work; we’re not supposed to pay to get it published. It’s not our fault that everyone submits stories but nobody pays to read the stories submitted, and we’ll all go to SFWA to complain if the magazines go under. Now go away: I have a Buffy / Farscape crossover novel that I have to get off to St. Martin’s this evening."

Although the editors and publishers in other countries were sympathetic to the idea, it is currently unknown whether or not they will participate. At least one Australian editor expressed support for the bonfire, saying "Australia has only six million people, and between the four science fiction magazines in the country, we’ve received submissions from at least four million. Either we have a lot of razorback hunters and crocodile skinners with plenty of free time in the evening who will suddenly buy subscriptions so they can see their stories in print, or we’re going to have a bonfire of our own in our future."

– Edgar Harris is the former Sports Editor at “Science Fiction Age”. After this article was first published, Harris retired from most forms of journalism, and now makes his living as a horticulturalist specializing in carnivorous plants. He is attempting to breed a species of Sarracenia that will feed on unsolicited manuscripts, to provide a year-round, ecologically-friendly alternative to the bonfire.

In an industry besieged by variables, there is but one reliable constant in publishing — everyone thinks they know how to make the business better (more profitable, more reliable, more efficient, or "fairer", whatever that means in their perspective), and they are all wrong.

To further understand their wrongness, the set of everyone must be divided into three groups:

• People outside the publishing business, who look at a few public statistics and performance indicators and shake their heads in wonder at how anyone in the industry makes any money at all;
• People with a professional stake in the business, who look at their own performance indicators and wonder if they could be making more money if they had control over the other segments of the industry; and
• Whiners.

It’s this third group that provides the most fun — mostly because they think they’re in the first group.

In my Guardian column, I frequently lampooned the half-baked, self-centred, hopelessly flawed and often counter-productively idiotic theories of journalists, authors and social commentators who pointed their rose-tinted telescopes at a segment of the publishing industry and pronounced it any number of unflattering adjectives — usually without explicitly stating their central complaint, that no-one was buying their book. Begging your indulgence, it’s a tradition I wish to continue.

Sramana Mitra’s column at Forbes.com

In this instalment, we will examine the argument presented by one Sramana Mitra, in a recent column for Forbes.com called "How Amazon Could Change Publishing". Now, I know little about Ms Mitra beyond her biography, which says she’s an entrepreneur and strategy consultant. Please remember this fact.

If you haven’t read the article, fear not: I’m told that you can click on the words in blue in the previous paragraph. However, the thrust of her argument is that Amazon (the web retailer, not the river) could — nay, should — dominate the publishing industry, removing the "middle-man", and the entire concept of publishing as it is known today, by printing and retailing every book directly.

I’m going to leave that elephant in the room for a few minutes, and deconstruct some points in her argument. Mitra states that:

• the publishing industry is "archaic beyond belief" — without providing any archaeological evidence. Yes, books are essentially the same medium of dark ink printed on light paper that they’ve been since Gutenberg, a system almost as archaic as the outmoded practice of growing food in the ground.
• the industry "treats its most important asset–the author–badly" — though the only suggestion of bad treatment is that authors don’t get a big enough piece of the pie.
• Amazon is "the largest bookseller in the world" — which may be true, but it still only accounts for around 15% of the book market.
• Vanity publisher iUniverse’s biggest seller to date is Amy Fisher’s memoir, a "NYT bestseller" that sold 34,000 copies. I’m sure there’s a more interesting story in why that book wasn’t published by a traditional publisher, involving the words "market disinterest" and "shitness", but 34,000 copies of a "celebrity" memoir is pretty unremarkable, and really only serves to demonstrate how ineffective the vanity press approach is.
• "The agent takes 15% to 20%" of the gross proceeds from book sales. This is flat-out wrong, and its inclusion demonstrates a fundamental flaw in Mitra’s limited understanding of how publishing works. Agents take 15% of the author’s contracted payment for a book, not the gross (on a typical 10% royalty-after-advance contract, this amounts to no more than 1.5% of the gross). Even if this ridiculous number was true, the other figures she gives — 50% to retailers, and 20% to publishers — leaves 10-15% completely unaccounted for.
• "On a book that costs $24.95, the author gets at most $1 to $1.50" — or so says the CEO of a print-on-demand publisher, always the first choice for accurate statistics on revenues from traditional book publishing.

This is a blinkered, seriously inaccurate summation of the economics of traditional book publishing. But it’s the necessary foundation for Mitra’s absurd theory:

[Amazon] could directly engage with authors and cut out the middlemen: the agent and the publisher. That would free up 30% to 40% of the pie, which can easily be split between Amazon and the author.

It gets better:

Let’s say, in the new world, Amazon becomes the retailer, marketer, publisher and agent combined and takes 65% of the revenues, offering 35% to the author–we end up with a much better, fairer world.

And the result of this:

Amazon likely will use its power to build direct relationships with authors and gradually phase out publishers and agents. It will first go after the independent print-on-demand self-publishers and get the best authors from that world [like Amy Fisher]. Amazon will then take on the large publishers.

It’s difficult for a man of my years to be sure he grasps all the implications of such outstanding wrongheadedness. But let me try to elaborate how I interpret this:

• Mitra’s main issue with the publishing industry is that it doesn’t pay authors enough.
• The solution to this is to let one company completely dominate the publishing industry, essentially becoming the publishing industry.
• Once Amazon has established its monopoly on the printed word, it will freely decide to give authors more money, and authors will all be delighted.
• Every existing "middle-man" in the industry — agents, publishers, and all other retailers — can just fuck off, and die.

Let me just reiterate that this plan is coming from an entrepreneur and strategy consultant — someone to whom those "middle-men" would usually turn, to consult on a strategy to avoid this exact scenario. Nowhere in the article does Mitra hint at how other companies could combat this, or even survive in such a market. (The article is clearly written for Forbes’ ambitious-but-uninformed-writer demographic.)

There are any number of minor concerns you might have about such a "change" — such as, the death of free speech and independent thought — but my chief concern is the staggering hubris and myopia demonstrated by one of Mitra’s remarks in the commentary after the article:

As for authors choosing to work with Amazon – well, if Amazon can guarantee that using their recommendation / co-branding / merchandising system, they can sell a million copies of my book, why wouldn’t I work with them exclusively? I don’t know about you, but I certainly would.

Not only is this a blunt statement of Mitra’s prejudice — she’s only thinking as a (possible) author, not at all as a rational economist — but it’s also prima facie stupidity. Amazon is not going to guarantee to any author, save maybe Dan Brown, that they’ll sell a million copies. Given their 15% share of the book market, only the uber-bestsellers like James Patterson are even likely to sell over a million copies of a title through Amazon alone (Amy Fisher is certainly out of the race). Based on Mitra’s figures of 35% royalties on a book selling for $24.95, that’s an advance of $8.7 million dollars. (There’s the solution, then. Authors should agree to work with Amazon exclusively if they guarantee payment of $8.7 million dollars per book.)

There are problems in the publishing industry, certainly — but the solution to this, and indeed any economic problem, has never been "Let the big guy own everything". The publishing industry will survive, as long as it continues to refrain from taking advice from unpublished authors.

Sir Thomas Evelyn de Kay’s long-running Guardian column "Balderdash" won an unprecedented five straight Jonathan Swift Awards ("the Swifty") between 1983-88, for Best Use of Metaphor or Allegory In Social or Artistic Criticism.

If you would like to recommend an article about books or publishing for the Balderdash treatment, please send the URL to balderdash@101reasonstostopwriting.com.