In Quarrel with Amazon, B&N Backs Down for the Sake of Authors

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The below announcement from the Authors Guild reports that Barnes & Noble has acceded to pleas from the Guild not to make authors collateral damage in the war with Amazon over the latter’s business practices including exclusive content agreements.

Here’s the Guild’s announcement in full:

Richard Curtis

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Here’s some welcome news: Barnes & Noble has agreed to our request to bring Marshall Cavendish children’s books back to their stores’ shelves. By our count, more than 250 authors and 150 illustrators have been affected.

How these books got pulled in the first place is a lesson in how exclusive content agreements have begun balkanizing the book marketplace.

In December, Amazon Publishing purchased Marshall Cavendish’s children’s book list, more than 450 children’s and young adult titles. The next month, Barnes & Noble announced that it would not be stocking any Amazon published titles in its stores. B&N released a statement from Jaime Carey, its chief merchandising officer, saying that it would not stock books published by Amazon, “based on Amazon’s continued push for exclusivity with publishers, agents and the authors they represent.”

With this announcement, B&N pulled Marshall Cavendish children’s books from its shelves. For Debby Dahl Edwardson, the timing could not have been worse or more devastating. Her most recent book, “My Name is Not Easy,” had been selected as a 2011 National Book Award Finalist. This sort of recognition can transform an author’s career, and authors typically visit countless bookstores to make the most of such opportunities. Ms. Edwardson, however, found her opportunity drastically curtailed. Barnes & Noble removed her book from its shelves (including from the shelves of its store in Fairbanks, Alaska, the one nearest the author’s North Slope home) about two months after the National Book Awards ceremony.

As we’ve made clear over the last several years, we’re very concerned with Amazon’s rapidly growing dominance of bookselling. Exclusive content is a big part of that story. With $9 billion in cash, Amazon can afford to cut more deals as it did with DC Comics to acquire exclusive e-book rights to titles, as it tries to gain the upper hand in the e-reader and tablet market.

So we’re sympathetic to the position of brick-and-mortar booksellers, even the largest of them: this isn’t a fair fight, by any stretch. Still, it’s essential that authors and readers not become collateral damage. The authors and illustrators who signed contracts with Marshall Cavendish had no way of anticipating that the publisher would assign their contracts to Amazon. For these authors to lose their vital showroom presence in Barnes & Noble stores was clearly unfair and harmful. Children’s books, especially picture books, need to be seen to be appreciated by readers.

We fear that more and bigger battles in bookselling and book publishing loom in the months ahead. For the sake of authors and readers, we hope those fighting it out will avoid using access to vital literary marketplaces as a weapon.

Unfortunately, this seems unlikely. Amazon is seizing an ever-growing share of the bookselling market, but it’s after far bigger game. Deploying some of its cash to buy publishers with deep backlists is an inexpensive way for Amazon to ensure that its Kindle Fire is an essential device to many readers, who then can be sold movies, TV shows, and music through the platform. Amazon’s history suggests it won’t be shy in these efforts.
Meanwhile, Barnes & Noble isn’t backing down. Its executives made clear to us that it is making this exception because it announced the policy after Amazon announced its purchase of the Marshall Cavendish titles. For any new Amazon acquisitions, Barnes & Noble’s policy is to ban the books from their shelves.

For now, however, some good news for Marshall Cavendish authors and illustrators.
We’ll keep you posted on any developments.

Richard Curtis

About Richard Curtis

Richard Curtis is a leading New York literary agent (www.curtisagency.com) who foresaw the Digital Book Revolution and launched an e-book publishing company early in 2000. E-Reads (www.ereads.com) is one of the foremost independent e-book publishers in the industry, specializing in reprints of genre fiction by leading authors in their fields. Curtis is also a well-known authors advocate, author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction including several books about the publishing industry, and prolific blogger – see his hundreds of other blog posts here.

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One thought on “In Quarrel with Amazon, B&N Backs Down for the Sake of Authors

  1. In my own move to protest Amazon’s bid to dominate the book market I removed my ebook titles from KDP and have disabled direct distribution to Amazon from my publisher. If Amazon ever gets off its lazy fat A** and begins to sell books I may return, but at this point I doubt it. To date in the four years I have worked with Amazon it has not sold enough copies of any of my books to make it viable as an effective or profitable marketplace, and my efforts to make my books the best quality possible are lost amid the growing catalog of junk and free books offered. The exclusivity clause in Amazon’s lending program alone made me think seriously about this, and I do not miss a bookseller which must engage in offering books for free in order to make itself into a monopoly. I expect Barnes & Noble to take up the slack. But I don’t put all my eggs in one basket as I have my titles wherever I can put them. The only way to make Amazon sit up and take notice of its slipping market share is for all disenfranchised authors to do the same.

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