Wednesday, September 17, 2014

Dear Authors: You ain't better than NOBODY.

So Screedster hasn't felt like getting into this Amazon-Hachette thing, because there are already skilled people telling the Hachette supporters what naive fucking dipshits they are.

But then yesterday I came across this letter to Amazon from "Authors United" and signed by people like Richard Patterson, Amy Hempel, Richard Russo, and a lot of others who are carrying water for Hachette, which is a corporation that doesn't give the slightest shit about them any more than Amazon does.

I wasn't very far into into when I realized it was full of stupid goddamn statements, but it was only when I came across this paragraph that I blew my fucking top:
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.
Holy shit.  I couldn't believe they said that. I mean, I knew a lot of writers were entitled douchebags, but HOLY HOLY SHIT.

Richard Patterson, Amy Hempel, Richard Russo and all you other people who signed this letter: do you realize that REAL PEOPLE make those fucking razor blades and shoes and toasters and televisions?

That when the companies that make razor blades and shoes and toasters and televisions get in a dispute with Amazon, real people feel the pinch?

That when razor blade and shoe manufacturing are "outsourced to China," that real people lose their jobs?

Real people, by the way, who are no fucking worse for you just because they don't write books.

Real people, by the way, who are your goddamn AUDIENCE, who need money to buy YOUR fucking books.

But YOU should be exempt from the trials and tribulations that they face, because YOU write books. You are unique, and quirky, and lonely, and writing those books is often expensive, unlike those poor mindless drones who stand all day in the assembly line, derp derp derp.

Holy fucking Christ fuck.

If you were stuck in the mountains in the snow with people who made razor blades, shoes, toasters, and televisions, and you all realized you had to start eating each other in order to survive, your argument would be, "I must dine on ze flesh of ze common worker, because I am ze artiste!"

Fuck you. FUCK YOU.

I cannot fucking believe that the inheritors of Dickens's, Sinclair's, and Steinbeck's legacies would have the unmitigated gall to suggest that because you're a writer, you're somehow more important than other people.

You know what I wish? I wish each and every one of you never makes another penny writing, and you have to get jobs making razor blades, shoes, toasters, or televisions. Do that for five years, day after day, and then come back and tell me that fucking delicate genius authors ought to be treated differently from everyone else.

In the meantime, go fuck yourself.

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