Amazon: I was once a five a day person

I don't have an agenda, let's make that clear first. In fact, a few years ago you might say I was making Amazon quite a bit of money. Apart from being a published author, one of thousands that made Amazon a little bit of cash through my endeavours, I was also a frequent buyer, making them lots of money from buying anything from LCD screens to books and DVDs. I was spending around £2000-3000 a year on Amazon, and I was quite happy doing so. I bought a Kindle and plenty of books. I used Amazon when my local bookshop didn't have the book I wanted in stock. I bought DVDs, then blu-rays, through Amazon when high-street stores closed and HMV got it's pricing model all wrong (and still has, in my opinion).

I was your perfect Amazon buyer, and seller, the kind of person that Amazon loves. The kind of person that en masse helps a business grow into a monopoly. The kind of person that breeds power.

And then the roof fell in. 

Firstly, it was the scams. And yes, these are scams whether they are legal or not. The kind of scams were you post deals online that are too good to be true. And they were. Products that were discounted 60% to undercut rivals, and yet when it came down to it, Amazon had no intention of shipping those orders. They were, after all, pre-orders and according to Amazon, entitled to say these orders were either out of stock before they were stocked, or an admin error. It happened quite frequently to the point I stopped pre-ordering stuff. Other non-pre-order deals were met in the same way, and cost me money when I could have bought from another store at the same time. No, Amazon had no intention of selling this product as a deal; they just didn't want to lose business. 

This wasn't about the customer as their helpline keeps saying, but about business share. It pissed me off. My Amazon spending dropped from three grand a year, to maybe a few hundred quid, and even then I started using their marketplace and not Amazon directly, to guard against disappointment. 

And then the tax debacle came up. The fact that Amazon never paid taxes whenever everyone else was being screwed by the recession, got my back up. The fact that Amazon were evading tax by any means necessary (and unnecessary) when public services in the UK were being ripped apart by debt, was infuriating. No matter the excuses from their chief execs, all I could see was a business willing to build its empire, while peddling a Robin Hood philosophy to their customers. When in fact Amazon was stealing from the poor to give to its share-holders. You see, those taxes could have been spent on services such as the NHS, teaching our kids at school, and libraries, those pillars of knowledge that are so important to people with very little money, and were being closed all around the country due to public debt. I wonder, Jeff Bezos, if you realise how many libraries you might have saved had your company paid the taxes you owed - quite a few. 

By Amazon not paying taxes, UK customers were in fact being taxed by the government to make ends meet. So while someone might have thought they were getting a 20% discount on a DVD or a toy for their nephew, they were not. It was closer to 15% or 10% if you factor that they were paying Amazon's taxes; or they were losing those important mental health services, or the damage to our cars from pot-holes in the roads, or our libraries being closed, because of Amazon not paying their taxes.

There's no Robin Hood here, I thought. 

No, Amazon is acting like a Sheriff of Nottingham, plain and simple.

So I soon stopped buying from Amazon completely, even its marketplace, to the extent I removed my credit card details from the site.

Since then, we've had Amazon changing the terms of marketplace traders, cutting their profits while increasing Amazon's. We've had AmazonKDP terms changed (not significantly but whenever a business enrols you in their programme by default without negotiation, whatever the benefits they sell to you, you know this will be a sign of the future - self-publishers beware). And now we have disputes with Hachette and Disney over profits and ludicrous discounting. 

The Hachette situation is the one that we should all be wary of, not because of why it is happening, but how. The fact that Amazon is not only stopping orders on the Hachette titles is entirely up to them, but as the Author's United open letter in the NY Times states: "to prevent or discourage customers from ordering or receiving the books they want ... It is not right for Amazon to single out a group of authors, who are not involved in the dispute, for selective retaliation. Moreover, by inconveniencing and misleading its own customers with unfair pricing and delayed delivery, Amazon is contradicting its own written promise to be "Earth's most customer-centric company."

No, it's not right in a moral world. But this is business. Amazon has shown its true face and its not a pretty one. Like so many customers, like so many writers, I bought into the smiley, rosy cheeked Amazon, bathed in its discounts, the promise of success and everything else Amazon was selling, and did so with optimism. 

Now I know what Amazon are, and I don't like it.

So with immediate effect, and with agreement from Thirst eDition Fiction, I've taken down The Secret War ebook from Amazon. I don't have any say on the ebooks with my current publisher, Editions Didier, that's up to them, but in all honesty I don't think they make too much money out of Amazon anyway - their market lies elsewhere (mainly in France, which for my money, is the ideal model for book selling and a good example of why the net book agreement should never have been scrapped). 

But for any future self publishing exercise I will not be using Amazon again. This is just my stance. I'm not advocating everyone else do this, but if they did, self-published writers would certainly be empowered. Personally, I cannot stand by and watch Amazon continue like this.

And if you want further convincing, ask yourself why a company would misrepresent George Orwell's writing to back up their own wretched cause, stating that Orwell would have been a friend of Amazon during this bitter dispute? Is this the sign of Amazon's own big brother world where a major company can quite happily change the meaning of someone else's work to fit their reasoning? Is this Amazon's version of Orwell's Newspeak - the deleting of the truth to justify the lie?

Well, if it's not, and this blunder is a genuine mistake, then it just means that Amazon are pretty ignorant, and arrogant, to believe they can get away with it. And if they think that, writers and readers need to act now before we wake up to find we have less freedom to sell our books or read them.

A Pint of Erest

I had an idea a while back to start blogging about the stuff that gets me going, those bits of inspiration that carries me to my imagination and that protean playground of endless possibilities. I even had a list of books, music and film that I'd blog about.

What has happened since then, is that I've discovered Pinterest. To be honest with you, after tweeting, occasionally Fazbooking (though not much, that's kinda relegated by me), blogging, and dicking about with my new website (and the Thirst eDitions Website), I haven't had much time for more social media. I've never Link'din (and don't plan to, so stop pestering!), I registered with Instagram, and soon after de-registered, and thought Pinterest was just one more time-waster.

But I'm willing to give anything a go.

What attracted me to Pinterest was the ability to use it as a scrap-book for all that research on the current project. The current novel, Their Machines of War, is taking a lot of research right now. I've trawled the net for pictures and writings (fiction and non-fiction) on steam works, old locomotives, anything really that predates 20th century technology. I could have thrown myself into the world of steam-punk, and fuck the research, but like The Secret War before, I prefer to go into a genre from the foundations up rather than build on what others have done. If the current work in progress is seen ultimately as a steam-punk novel, so be it. I won't argue. But I'm not aiming to write a steam-punk novel. I'm aiming for a generational epic about the apocalypse of technology, where progress is feared and social collapse is around the corner.

(I also love the idea of using my kid's favourite toys as inspiration. I was never really into steam trains as a child, but strangely my two are. When I tell them I'm going upstairs to write about trains, they get really excited. I haven't told them yet that I probably know as much as them about steam engines, but that's where the research comes in. By the end of this book, I'll be an expert, probably!).

Anyway, back to Pinterest ... It's a great place to store stuff and to think. But I haven't just limited my Pinterest account to my current research. I've got my published books there too, and anything else that's related to my writing career.

I've also put in those songs, books, movies and people that inspire me. It's a work in progress, just like my novel, just like my life, really. I hope that my Pinterest account will be an insight into how my brain is working (or sometimes not!), and my own creative process.

But I'll let you be the judge of that ... so click here and take a gander.

MFW also does "quiet"

Crikey. It's been nearly a year since I last blogged. Strangely it's not because it's been quiet on the writing front either. Anything but. It's time, really. When you factor the writing, the social media, such as twitter, forums etc and general life, it's given me zilch time to get my blogging done.

So it's been almost a year. Sheesh.

So what's happened? Plenty. I've had another book accepted for publication that's due out this year or early next. The book, provisionally titled The Isles of Sheffield, will be published by those good people at Editions Didier, part of the Hachette Livre Group, and the second book under my new editor Rupert Morgan. It's a dystopian/ eco-apocalypse novel, and the first to be set in my home-city of Sheffield. Once I'm in the position of saying more, I'll post more stuff about it here.

I'm also in the process of renovating the website. I've decided to move homes mainly because the new home gives me better access and I can update stuff real-time rather than rely on the goodwill of others as time will allow. Stir Creative did a brilliant job on the original site, but I need to be more hands on, so that's another project that's taking my time.

I'm also writing (would you expect anything less?). I'm in the middle of writing a 160,000 word story set in the future which is entertaining me no end, and I'm writing a horror novel (my first) between drafts.

Unfortunately with the good news, comes the bad.

Last year, my agent Dorothy Lumley died. This is the first time I've written publicly about it, because her death caught me by surprise in more ways than I expected. Regular readers here will know that I became Dorothy's client a couple of years back. While I was represented by Dorothy for a relatively short time before her death, she had supported me before then. As an aspiring writer, it was Dorothy who offered advice and guidance, while other agents were sending back standard rejection letters and no advice at all. But more importantly, she encouraged me. When all in publishing appeared to keep the door firmly shut, Dorothy told me to keep going.
And I did.
And eventually I was published.

When I left Macmillan Publishers a few years back, feeling a little directionless, Dorothy was there again. This time she took me on officially as one of her clients. It was unfortunate that the only time we officially worked together, would prove to be her last years on Earth.
I found out last summer that Dorothy had cancer and, unbeknown to me, had been battling it while she was working with me. The cancer was taking her fast. The news upset me greatly. Selfishly, I felt I'd been deprived of getting to know a wonderful person, someone who had confidence in me, and supported me. I admit, I felt lost again.

Dorothy died late last year. And yet, since her death I haven't felt lost. I haven't let myself be. It would be a disservice to everything she told me to suddenly lose direction again. So I haven't let all her words of encouragement leave me, nor her advice and confidence in me.

In the time we were agent and client, Dorothy wasn't able to close a book deal. The two books that were published, I managed to arrange myself (to Dorothy's bemusement!). She showed me that I can do some of these things myself and to have confidence in my abilities.

But publishing isn't just about the agent who will sort out the contract, who will negotiate the royalties or rights sales. Nor are they just the editor who gives your work a critical eye. An agent is, in many respects, a mentor, supporter, and friend.
For me, losing Dorothy was losing that friend. And I will miss her.