My apologies for having a podcast about something timely and then back-burner-ing it for other things. I still think it’s relevant, especially when we pull in the iPad discussion. If you haven’t followed the news, the Macmillan Amazon links are back up.

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• 00:00:06 ISBW #141
• 00:00:39 GoTo Meeting Message
• 00:01:27 State of the Mur: Snow! Ice! Cabin Fever. Project Underground is ready for beta readers.
• 00:04:32 The Amazon/Macmillan kerfuffle. What do readers think? How should consumers (as well as creators) handle the market changes due to Kindle, iPad, and publisher competition?
• 00:17:10 Promo: Beware the Hairy Mango
• 00:18:23 Interview: Ursula Vernon, author-illustrator of: Digger, Nurk, Dragonbreath, and Dragonbreath 2: Attack of the Ninja Frogs. You can find her at UrsulaVernon.com or Red Wombat Studio and if you can’t decide right away, go to Metal & Magic and enjoy the awesomely cute drawings as you ponder which link to click. You can find her books at B&N, Borders, Powell’s, and your local indie bookseller.

Unstoppable Force Meets Immovable Object (Via Topless Robot)

It’s been fascinating to see the pissing war that’s been Amazon and Macmillan. If you’re an author and don’t know what I’m talking about, I recommend getting acquainted quickly. In short: Macmillan wants to do a ranged price of ebooks (new releases around $15, and older books much lower, like $6.) Amazon’s response was to remove all Macmillan products. Not just the ebooks, all the products. (The books still have pages, but there are no “buy now” buttons, you can get them only from third party sellers.)

There are many people who have better write-ups on this than I ever could. I recommend John Scalzi, Jay Lake, and Cheryl Morgan. If you want a one-stop shop for all the talk, you can’t do much better than Charles Tan’s Bibliophile Stalker blog.

The issue of ebook pricing is a big mess, I will fully agree with that. As a consumer and a kindle user, I love saving money. However as an author, I love having money to save in the first place. There’s a lot of arguing going on about the cost of ebooks, the perceived value, and money-grubbing companies.

But my main issue comes with the removal of the print books from Amazon. That was unnecessary. That makes everyone (incl. Amazon!) lose money, and it’s a **** move, akin to, “You don’t like how I play the game? Fine! I’m taking my ball and going home!” Also, Macmillan has written notes (Note 1, Note 2) to the public twice, both from the CEO, and Amazon released one statement, from the Kindle team, deep in the Kindle forums on Amazon. As I don’t know where I stand on the ebook pricing war, I do know that I respect straight forward talk and responses that don’t actively hurt authors, like removal of print books (many authors didn’t even have kindle versions, but they’re being punished too.)

This is an ugly war, and it’s been going on for nearly a week. I’m curious where it goes, but I gotta say, I’m not much of an Amazon fan right now. I did just learn about IndieBound, which seems to be able to support indie booksellers but also be a useful tool online. I’ll be playing with it more, and updating the links on my sites to show other options than Amazon. After all, I want my listeners to be able to buy Macmillan authors’ books. (Also, did you know that Barnes and Noble takes Paypal?)

(Full disclosure: I’m not a Macmillan author but I do draw a check from them as I blog and podcast for Tor.com. But my opinions are my own.)

But from the outside, here’s what we KNOW happened: many, many books, focusing mainly on gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, disabled, feminist, and sexual abuse issues (this included Heather Has Two Mommies, a bio of Ellen DeGeneres, and Paul Monnette’s 1992 National Book Award winner Becoming a Man) were pulled from the Amazon search rankings. What this means is that they won’t show up on bestseller lists, and searching for general topics (for example, “homosexuality” – imagine if you were a kid struggling with some issues and saw this search…) will not reveal the books.

It was a holiday weekend. Amazon is on the west coast. So I’m going to be watching keenly later today to see how they deal with this. I really can’t see the largest bookseller consciously doing a censoring action this huge and not addressing it, or fixing it ASAP.

But what concerns me is the response of some of people. Not even homophobes – just people who didnt really understand why this matters. Many authors were outraged at seeing their own books pulled. But one comment on a blog scared the crap out of me. Someone said that their books weren’t pulled, so they weren’t too upset.

By the electric hammer of Thor, are you insane?

I’m not gay, I don’t write books with queer themes, and I know this action – whatever the cause – is bad news for all authors and readers. As a reader, if you want to search for a book but can’t remember the title or the author, but it’s got this lesbian as the heroine and you remember the general theme, searching on amazon won’t help you.

And I can tell you, as a small press author who can probably safely say at LEAST 90% of my sales have come through Amazon, having your ranking pulled is a nightmare. If people are just looking for a general book about your theme, they’re not going to find it. And that kills your sales.

And also, it matters because, as Neil Gaiman says, once they censor the stuff that YOU don’t agree with, or even care about, they will have the precedent to censor more, and eventually they will censor the stuff that you think is OK, and then maybe they will censor the stuff that you actually like, and then you will think, “Oh no! We must stand up and FIGHT this!” And everyone will look at you, tired and beaten, and say, “Where the hell were you last year, jerk?”

As Gaiman says [the brackets are mine]-

Because if you don’t stand up for the stuff you don’t like [or write], when they come for the stuff you do like [or write], you’ve already lost.