I’ve blogged before about how I avoid buying things on Amazon (especially books!) whenever possible, since I don’t want to give money to a gigantic corporation that’s not only made the publishing landscape worse for authors and small publishers, it’s wreaked havoc on the retail economy as a whole.
I avoid Amazon because I want to make better decisions about where my money goes, how I live my life, and most importantly, how I portray myself as a writer and a creative person. For me, this was about making a REALLY important decision:
Am I the kind of writer who stands up for what I believe in, or the kind of writer who takes the easy route?
When I built my author webpage, I intentionally set up the page for MFA Thesis Novel in a way that encouraged people to buy it literally anywhere except Amazon, then put a link to the Amazon page at the bottom, if readers absolutely had to get it there. This seemed like a good balance between clarifying what kinds of buying options I wanted readers to consider (independent bookstores, Bookshop.org, and other non-Amazon online options) while also acknowledging the unfortunate reality that Amazon controls an enormous share of the book-buying market, and many readers (especially casual ones) are likely to go there first.
Anti-Monopoly Actions Are Being Taken Against Amazon
I’m writing this because I recently started following the Authors Guild’s encouraging of the FTC to investigate Amazon for monopolistic practices, a move that’s been in the works for a while. Because regulators in recent years have taken steps to block the acquisition of Big 5 publisher Simon and Schuster with the conglomerate that owns Penguin-Random House, a natural next step has been looking more closely at practices Amazon is already taking to control the market by filtering customers into more of its own products.
If you want to learn more about this, I highly encourage you to read The Stepping Stone to Monopoly: How Amazon Used the Bookselling Industry as the Foundation to its Unchecked Monopoly (a 30ish minute read). It begins by revealing how Amazon knowingly avoided collecting state sales taxes in the ’90s and early 2000s as part of its business plan to lure in customers, and how it’s bullied publishers into playing by its own rules, creating a top-down model that gives Amazon control over publishing and distribution while generally giving unfair deals to authors.
Taking action against Amazon ties in closely to the government taking actions to restrict the control that other Big Tech companies have over our personal information, the distribution of that information, and even the way they control our time and attention (as I’ve personally struggled with for years).
While Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, and other companies have enriched our lives in many ways, they’ve also made it worse in countless others by changing the nature of the world we live in and how we interact, especially in terms of the economic landscape. Reining these companies in with sensible regulations that protect individuals over enormous companies is a reasonable step the government can take to make our lives better, rather than allowing corporations to manipulate the landscape in a way that makes them the most money.
Don’t Give Up: Be Honest, and Speak Out
I think often about the “It is what it is” mentality, the belief that even though certain aspects of the world aren’t the way we’d like them to be, there’s nothing we can do about them, so we might as well just accept the way they are.
This way of thinking feels icky to me because it encourages feelings of powerlessness and complacency by driving people to accept things that genuinely aren’t working for them in the world. If enough people do this, then these aspects of the world we live in become normalized, and we start to see them as natural aspects of the world we live in, rather than intentional systems that are set up to benefit the needs of the few over the needs of the many. If enough people accept these unfair systems as “just the way things are,” then the culture changes, and these bad aspects of the world become accepted even more widely.
I encourage everyone reading this to think more deeply about your convictions: what you believe in, the world you’d like to see, and the function you’d like to have in the world around you.
If you genuinely don’t care about any of these things and have other priorities (whether in your creative life, or otherwise), then certainly, put those priorities first, and go from there.
But if you’re like me, and you care deeply about the nature of the world we live in, including establishing more solid career paths for creative people and building an economic landscape that’s more fair for everyone, don’t just accept that the way things are is the way they always have to be.
One easy way to start is by discussing these things in frank, open terms that acknowledges that they could be better. If you’re upset that your health insurance is too expensive, tell people that other countries don’t pay nearly as much as we do for health care, and that we don’t have to either.
If you’re having trouble buying a house or finding a decent apartment to live in at a reasonable price, be open about the reality that the housing problem has concrete causes that we can take action to solve.
And if you’re a writer like me who isn’t happy with how much control Amazon wields over the marketplace, you can start by acknowledging that what they’re doing isn’t right, and goes against existing regulations for monopoly and fair trade (again, check out the white paper I linked to above!).
In short, being honest with yourself and others that these unfair practices are unfair, and not “just the way things are” is the first step toward doing something about them, even if that’s the only action you ever take (which I hope it isn’t!).