I’m sure the robin thinks he’s doing a great job.  After all, he’s maintained the integrity of his turf and he’s still alive.  Winning, right?  Entirely the right attitude to be an author in his next life.

Obviously, he’s been observing through the window between his winning rounds.  My taxes are finished and ready to be filed.  Here’s something you might not know about the writing life.  As long as you make some money at it, you can deduct the money you lose, i.e., this is how you can win.

I’ll explain.   In order to avoid embarrassment, let’s say that I’m giving a hypothetical example.  Let’s say that literary agent Doris Michaels, who represented my first novel, did a great job selling foreign rights.   In several big countries (say Canada) I was familiar with the currency.  The currency of other countries, however, not so much.  In a few of those countries, let’s imagine the rights sold for what seemed like astronomical sums to my economics-challenged brain.  Here’s a specific, still entirely hypothetical example:   who wouldn’t be excited to hear that the advance was 2,394,698 gumbalsklots and that the publisher wanted a new color head shot for a marketing campaign?  (It was probably my sister, who actually passed algebra, who not only did that currency conversion but looked up the literacy rate of the country for good measure.  If I weren’t giving you a made-up example, I’d mention the figure $74.13 as the actual advance after the deductions to pay the domestic and foreign agent, the taxes, the bank exchange fees, etc.)  Hey, a sale is a sale, right?

Anyway, here’s the point.  Those old foreign sales pay royalties on a schedule so random and top secret that predicting a stock market rise appears a breeze in comparison.  So envision a writer who might be me finding a check in her mailbox last week, eleven years after the fact.  It might not be a big check, but it’s income.  Enough people bought that particular translation that while it’s not exactly paying the bills, it means she’ll already be able to deduct the current year’s expenses a year from now.  It’s already a good year.  You see how little it takes to encourage a writer?  You have to be a little crazy to make it.  You find reason, like the robin, to say, Winning.  And there’s always the plain love of the work.  There’s that.

Now I’ll tell you what makes us—or at least me—crazy to begin with.  As part of the American Library Association’s annual State of America’s Libraries Report, their Office for Intellectual Freedom has released their list of the ten most frequently challenged books and authors in 2011:

* ttyl; ttfn; l8r, g8r (series), by Lauren Myracle
* The Color of Earth (series), by Kim Dong Hwa
* The Hunger Games trilogy, by Suzanne Collins
* My Mom’s Having A Baby! A Kid’s Month-by-Month Guide to Pregnancy, by Dori Hillestad Butler
* The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie
* Alice (series), by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
* Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
* What My Mother Doesn’t Know, by Sonya Sones
* Gossip Girl (series), by Cecily Von Ziegesar
* To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee

I’ve previously been clear about what I think of book challenges, which are initiatives to ban.  (Here’s the American Library Association’s page explaining the relationship between challenges, banning and censorship:  http://www.ala.org/advocacy/banned/aboutbannedbooks) if you’d like an explanation.

But seriously.  Even if you disagree with the Bill of Rights and think censorship is an okay thing, can you wrap your mind around To Kill A Mockingbird as one of the ten most frequently challenged books of 2011?  This was required reading for me in the ninth grade.  Thank goodness.  It was a life-changing book because it made me see writing fiction as a fully worthy calling.  I understood that a beautifully conceived and told story can seep into the mind and soul, affect thinking and attitudes by the power of acute observation of the human heart and truth of the human condition.  It’s the novel I’d most like to have written, a model of literary voice and brilliance.

Can someone tell me why we wouldn’t want To Kill A Mockingbird in any and every library?  Why would anyone want to take us so backward?  You see where I’m headed?  I have finally identified my life goal:  it’s to refine my craft until it shines so undeniably, to write something so deep, fine, pure and true that, given the direction the country seems to be going, it will be “challenged” out of every library in America.

Outdoors, lilacs hang like bunches of ripe grapes and red tulips open too wide, hungry for the rapture of sunlight in the electric air.  I think I’ll go out now and see if there’s a window that robin isn’t using at the moment.

As a reader and an author, I know how a good brick and mortar bookstore can help literature flourish.  The New England postcard town of Washington, Connecticut still has a spectacular bookshop, The Hickory Stick.  It’s the best of what we’re losing all over the country as the independents are driven out of business.  I always leave with more than what I went in for because I can’t resist:  maybe it is the cover, or the tag line, the design, the sheer delightful feel of a another volume that I wouldn’t have seen if I hadn’t been in the store, dipping in and out of chapters oblivious to time.  The people who work there have recommendations that are spot on, as is often the case with independent booksellers, generally wide and sophisticated readers.   They bring in authors to give readings that prompt thought, analysis, discussion, enthusiasm.  In many ways, The Hickory Stick serves as a local culture center.  Its influence extends well beyond the boundaries of the hilly little town where historic New England homes randomly surround the town green like old family jewels scattered in the foothills of the Berkshires.

Another independent dear to my heart is The Provincetown Bookshop (Provincetown, MA), a half block back from Cape Cod bay on Commercial Street, long in the same spot, tightly packed floor to ceiling with a surprisingly eclectic collection.   And here’s the standout:  you can always buy autographed editions of all of Mary Oliver’s prose and poetry.

I almost forgot the eclectic, big, home-town comfortable, creative genius of Joseph Beth Booksellers in Cincinnati,  famous for literary signings and its amazing separate children’s section.  I wonder if you have a favorite bookstore, whether chain or independent?  (Is it still there, or has it closed?)  Where is it, and what’s the best thing about it?

I realize many readers do much of their book buying from Amazon.  And many are in love with their Kindles.  As an author, I have an uneasy relationship with both.  It’s complicated, to say the least.  Recently The Authors Guild, of which I’m a member, published an article that does the best job I’ve seen of explaining the impact of Amazon’s growing choke-hold on book publishing.  It’s somewhat long and aimed at professionals, but I’m reposting the full text at the bottom for anyone who is interested.   But here’s the last section, which distills the point of it:

We aren’t Barnes & Noble’s champions, or at least we aren’t their champions by choice. We’d favor a far more diverse and robust retail landscape for books, and we encourage all readers to patronize their local bookstores as they would their farmers’ markets or any other businesses that enrich the quality of life in their towns and neighborhoods. But here’s where we are: Barnes & Noble is book publishing’s sole remaining substantial firewall. Without it, browsing in a bookstore would become a thing of the past for much of the country, and we would largely lose the most important means for new literary voices to be discovered.

A truly competitive, open market has no indispensable player that can call the shots. The book publishing industry has such a player, and Amazon is poised and by all appearances eager to use its muscle to rip up the remaining physical infrastructure of book retailing and the vital book-browsing ecosystem it supports.

If Amazon succeeds, the free market will have had little to do with it.

So if you are willing and have the opportunity, please do at least some of your book buying in real stores, especially real book stores.  Especially independent bookstores.  It’s one critical thing you can do to support a flourishing literary culture.

Amazon, Innovation, and the Rewards of the Free Market

(An article sent to members of the The Author’s Guild on 2/16/12.  Posted by permission)

Our article from two weeks ago, Publishing’s Ecosystem on the Brink: The Backstory, and similar articles spur frequent comments online that Amazon is simply reaping the rewards of its innovation, that its growing dominance of book publishing is merely a demonstration that the free market is functioning as it should. This isn’t really what’s been happening.

Useful innovation should of course be rewarded, but we’ve long had laws in place (limits on the duration and scope of patent protections, antitrust laws, stricter regulation of industries considered natural monopolies) that aim to prevent innovators and others from capturing a market or an industry. There’s good reason for this: those who capture a market tend to be a bit rough on other participants in the market. They also tend to stop innovating.

Amazon’s first Kindle, released in November 2007, was certainly innovative, but its key breakthrough wasn’t any particular piece of technology. Sony had already commercialized e-ink display screens for handheld e-books in September 2006. (E Ink, a Cambridge company co-founded by MIT Media Lab professor Joseph Jacobson developed the displays used by both companies.) Amazon’s leap was to marry e-ink displays to another existing technology, wireless connectivity, to bring e-book shopping and downloading right to the handheld device.

Amazon’s innovation, in other words, was to untether the Sony device and put a virtual store inside it. This is no small achievement, and Jeff Bezos’s particular genius seems to be his ability to grasp the transformative potential of this sort of thing long before others do, just as he saw the potential of databases and the Internet to facilitate shopping for books and the potential for one-click shopping to ramp up online sales before most others had caught on.

Amazon’s reward for developing the wireless e-reader should have been that it would become a significant vendor of e-books and earn a profit commensurate with the value it added to the publishing ecosystem. Whether it would then continue to be a significant e-book vendor should have depended on whether it continued to innovate and provide good service to its customers. Amazon’s reward should not have included being able to combine its wireless e-reader, deep pockets, and an existing dominant position in a related, but separate, market — the online market for physical books — to prevent other vendors from entering the e-book market. Amazon’s reward as an innovator, in other words, shouldn’t be getting to wall itself off from competition.

By all appearances, this is precisely what Amazon was trying to pull off two years ago, when it removed the buy buttons from nearly every Macmillan book. Amazon removed the buy buttons for both e-books and, stunningly, print books, even though its disagreement with Macmillan was confined to the sales terms for e-books. Amazon had about 90% of the market for e-books at the time, but that market was then quite small: Macmillan could handle Amazon’s e-book blackout indefinitely. Amazon’s 75% of the online print book market, on the other hand, provided real leverage on Macmillan, and Amazon chose to use that leverage. By using its print book dominance to dictate terms in the nascent e-book market, Amazon crossed a clear, anticompetitive line.

One anticompetitive tactic in service of another

But it was even worse than that. Amazon had deployed its buy-button removal weapon before, but never so publicly, never on such a massive scale, and never (to our knowledge) as a means of shielding its ability to use a separate anticompetitive tactic: its practice of routinely selling e-books at a loss. Such practices, commonly known as predatory pricing, are a means of using superior capital resources not to innovate nor to provide better service, but to weaken or eliminate competition.

In Amazon’s hands, predatory pricing can be a particularly potent weapon. Surely no retailer in American history has had anything approaching Amazon’s database of deep, detailed, real-time market knowledge. This database eliminates the guesswork from marketing, as Amazon can run countless pricing experiments and immediately analyze the results. With this information, predatory prices can become smart bombs that are precisely targeted to maximize the sales of the latest Kindle to the most desirable categories of consumers, for example, or to maximize the losses of an incipient competitor.

… in service of a third

Predatory pricing could, in turn, help Amazon buttress its other critical barrier to entry into the e-book marketplace: its use of a proprietary e-book format, rather than the industry-standard epub format. Kindle owners would naturally be reluctant to switch to incompatible devices after they had sunk money into a personal e-library of Kindle editions. Viewed this way, Amazon’s costs incurred in selling e-books at a loss amounted to an investment in erecting walls around its young, booming e-book marketplace. The more Amazon succeeded in locking customers in to Kindle’s device and format, the less rewarding the market for any potential competitor. Amazon’s investment could pay off handsomely as the e-book market took off.

Amazon’s blackout of Macmillan’s titles came at a critical moment. Barnes & Noble, Amazon’s most significant bookselling rival, had just begun shipping its Nook e-reader the month before the blackout. The Nook was the first direct threat to Amazon’s e-book dominance, the first wireless e-ink challenger to the Kindle. Though sales of the Nook were reportedly brisk, Barnes & Noble could never hope to win a war of financial attrition with Amazon. If Amazon could compel publishers to fall in line with its predatory pricing of e-books, it could eliminate a thinly capitalized but potent (because of its physical, brick-and-mortar presence) competitor from the e-book market. It could smother Barnes & Noble’s Nook before it could pose a genuine challenge.

Amazon backed down — though not before decrying Macmillan’s “monopoly” over its books — and restored the print and e-book buy buttons. Macmillan and its thousands of authors regained access to the marketplace where 75% of online book buying transpires. The buy-button removal tactic had, for once, backfired on Amazon; the publicity over the blackout had taken a decidedly negative turn before the company changed course. Barnes & Noble would get a toehold in the e-book market, and, as we described in our last post, would turn out to be a surprisingly nimble and innovative competitor in the e-book market.

That rare setback for Amazon may yet prove to have been but a speed bump: through creative use of its capital and ever-growing market power, by compelling publishers to participate in its free book-of-the-month club for Kindle owners, by requiring public libraries to redirect their patrons to Amazon’s commercial website to borrow books for their Kindles, by starting an imprint to compete for authors now published by the largest commercial houses, and, no doubt, by countless uses of its powerful database of consumer behavior, Amazon continues to tighten its grip on the book industry. Its ambitions haven’t scaled back, and Barnes & Noble, still in the game (in no small part because of its success with the Nook), remains its most significant impediment.

We aren’t Barnes & Noble’s champions, or at least we aren’t their champions by choice. We’d favor a far more diverse and robust retail landscape for books, and we encourage all readers to patronize their local bookstores as they would their farmers’ markets or any other businesses that enrich the quality of life in their towns and neighborhoods. But here’s where we are: Barnes & Noble is book publishing’s sole remaining substantial firewall. Without it, browsing in a bookstore would become a thing of the past for much of the country, and we would largely lose the most important means for new literary voices to be discovered.

A truly competitive, open market has no indispensable player that can call the shots. The book publishing industry has such a player, and Amazon is poised and by all appearances eager to use its muscle to rip up the remaining physical infrastructure of book retailing and the vital book-browsing ecosystem it supports.

If Amazon succeeds, the free market will have had little to do with it.

Every November for ten days in Dwayne County, the hunters’ bright hats dot the woods like apples still hanging after frost.  They’ll even climb trees to hide in sometimes, the men, waiting for the creatures to leg their way into the rifle sights, noiseless except for the small rustle of leaves.  I can see that part in my mind without much bother.  But then I see the deer, its enormous eyes knowing and uncertain at once, picking its way along, just trying to live another day, and I wonder when is it that you can’t stand what’s about to happen?  I blink and flinch, hearing the simultaneous explosion and kick, like a hoof deep in a shoulder, and the stutter of a second shot.  Maybe someone else’s shot, from another side.  It happens, that close.  My good husband Harold used to be one of the hunters when he was alive.  He used to say the first shot is life, the way things are, the second shot is the mercy.

Our son Jason would have hunted, but he’d quit to save face when it turned out that he was the worst shot since the invention of guns.  Harold was thrilled when Jason and his wife had a son:  another chance at a hunting buddy and he didn’t think it was even possible that the boy could be as blind as Jason.  The hunting season that our grandson Cody was twelve and could first get a youth permit and legally hunt with Harold was right after Harold and I had to sell Mom’s house and have her move in with us.  We were having the mysterious gift of an Indian summer in mid-November and the day I’m remembering should have been a reassurance of heaven.

But I was banging around the kitchen slamming drawers with my hip and muttering, “Nothing lasts in this house.”  I winced and looked around, hoping I was alone.  Mom hadn’t been living with us long enough for me to remember to shut up when I was searching for what she’d put in some bizarre place, say ketchup in the freezer.  But what I’d said bothered me like a bad omen.  All I meant was that the spatula had disappeared, but the whole point of Mom living with us was so that she would last.  I’d said it to Harold:  if we don’t take her in, honey, she’ll never last.

I was in a terrible mood.  Nearly eligible for retirement and the great state of Indiana had decided that all teachers had to pass a CPR test in order to keep their jobs, never mind that I’d been working twenty-five years and didn’t have the name of a single dead student posted under mine.  That Saturday morning I’d had to grain our two horses after I made Mom’s breakfast, which made me late to class.  Like I was the fourth grader, the instructor made me demonstrate what he’d been showing everyone, which I didn’t exactly know, because I was late.  But big dumb Resus-It-Annie was lying on the floor, just waiting for me to restart her heart.  Wouldn’t I love for someone to restart mine some mornings?

Since I had skimmed the book, I found the spot and put my hand a notch above her sternum and I pumped and blew my life into hers, like I did every day with the kids in my class, and my husband, son and grandson, my life right into theirs.  I got tired, like I did worrying over them.  And the chickens and the livestock, not that we had much, but the feeding always fell to me.  I felt like screaming at Annie to buck up, for god’s sake, get up, go on, live, live, live.  No such luck.  The small green life light just flickered like a tease and then went out, meaning, I guess, that while I didn’t exactly kill her, I didn’t save her either.

When I got home to Mom, she was all stooped over and looking like a sneeze would knock her to the floor.  She was thick enough around the middle and the hump of her back, but her arms and legs were so frail they put me in mind of dry sticks.  Now I look at myself naked in the mirror and I see my body evolving or devolving into hers.  Mom’s palsy had gotten worse and worse.  The way her head moved back and forth, it looked like she was saying  “No, no, no,” constantly.  It grated me like cheese back then.  Now I wonder if she was saying no, I do not want this to be happening to me, and I wish I could tell her that now I finally understand.

“What’s going to happen to me, Louisa?  I’m all alone, Daddy’s gone.  I’ve got nobody,” she used to say, which made me want to tear out fistfuls of my hair.  Or maybe hers.  But I always tried to keep my voice patient and nice when I answered.

“You’re not all alone, Mom.  You’ve got me and Harold.  We’ll take care of you.  And you know how Cody loves you.  A great grandson, Mom.  Now that’s something special.  You can’t let Cody down.”  Which was sort of switching the point but I’d use whatever I could.

“You don’t understand.  You can’t understand.  But you’re a good daughter, Louisa, and I thank you.  My breasts are gone, have you noticed?  See?” she said, running her hands down the front of her blowsy shirt and working her body toward profile.  Her breathing whistled through her false teeth like a February wind, and her body was cold to the touch.  Sometimes, I couldn’t help it, I used to think of a chicken overly stewed and left to chill, the way her flesh seemed to be falling away from her body.

“No Mom, I hadn’t seen that,” I’d lie, “but I think it’s just normal.” Oh, she was right, I didn’t understand.  I hope she didn’t know what I felt.

Ours was always a random sort of a farm, acres of field corn backing up to Rush Run, the broad creek that runs behind it like a vein to the river, cutting its way through a mile-wide stand of old forest.  Back then we had Cinder, our black quarter horse mare, and Flash, Cody’s roan gelding, my beautiful flock of laying hens and Jack, the rooster; Crystal the sheep—don’t ask me why—and Nic and SeeSee, the yellow Labs.  Maggie and Marvelle presided in the barn.  And our goat, Pammy, had the yard much of the year.  Harold could not abide mowing and we got her between the time Jason left home and Cody was old enough to mow.  But by then Pammy was taking care of the patchy yard grass well, and giving milk, beside.

You see how little remains.

But about the deer.  The whole thing goes back to Mom and that same day after I got home from my CPR class.  Mom hadn’t wanted Harold to take Cody hunting.  She’d lived in town all her life and couldn’t accept it.  I tried to explain it to her the way Harold had first explained it to me, but the words weren’t mine and got stuck between my heart and my mouth.  The truth is that I think he liked having charge over things, as men do.  Maybe when you make something else die, you don’t think about dying yourself, you think you’re bigger than dying.

But Harold had taught Cody to shoot, and the boy had a gift with soup cans.  He’s good, Harold used to marvel before that day. What a shot.  He’d talked up how great it would be to hunt together, and Cody automatically loved whatever his Grandpa did.

The boy was antsy; he hadn’t gotten his deer yet and there’d be no more chances until next year.  Twilight was coming on and he was going to lose his bet with Harold, which probably was for all of fifty cents.  I was outside the barn when he came trudging up from the pasture toward the house; he’d been all day in the woods our back pasture skirts, making a last try for his antlers.

“I need bullets,” he called to me, a slump of crimson dejection.  “Only one left in the chamber.”  That meant he’d taken shots and missed.  Harold, who had to be with him, must have been waiting.

It was by pure chance that I spotted it, plainly out in the field that drops down to our woods, where Rush Run hurries on to get to another world.  I shouted to Cody, who was nearly to the back steps by then.  The deep-blue and purple-grey shadows edging out from the woods kept me from seeing whether it was buck or doe—Cody only had a youth permit for buck—but later the boy said he had seen the huge rack shining by as though by moonrise, or last sun, like something not quite of this earth, as he took off, running into the russet of late autumn.  I even prayed.  “Dear God,” I said.  “Let my grandson get that deer, he’s only got one bullet.”

What was I thinking?

I heard the gun after I went on in, after I’d stood staring into the dusk.  So did Mom, upstairs in her room, and it scared her pale until I told her what Cody was after.

“If he got it, have him bring it around so I can see it up close,: she said.  Mom was trying, I could tell, she was trying to keep a hold on herself, to get used to it here, to put things in their right places.

“Are you sure, Mom?  You know, it’s well, it’s different than what you’re used to.”

“I told you, Louisa, have him bring it around.”  I even asked her again.

I watched between the yellow print curtains at the kitchen window for Cody to come back while I started supper.  Our lunatic rooster was perched on the head of the cement goose Harold had bought at the fair, his idea of a joke because I’d said I’d like some geese in our back pond.  When Harold set it outside the back door, the poor rooster went mad, squawking and flapping and trying to mate with the goose every day.  Back then we all bent over laughing.  He’d give up after a while and sit on the goose’s head or back, pecking every once in a while trying to rouse her, but then he’d lapse back into mourning.  He used to put me in mind of Mom, wattles hanging from her upper arms, and longing for what’s not there.

Then Harold came running up toward the house waving his rifle.

“Cody got his buck!  It’s beautiful, it’s beautiful!  I saw him take it down.  What a shot.”  The storm door slapped behind him.  “He’s gonna need the truck to get it.  Where’d I leave the ropes?”  Harold was so happy for Cody, all sweating and flushed and breathing like a trumpeter gone to heaven.  I told him when he had it, to bring the truck around underneath Mom’s window so she could see it, too.

When I heard the truck bumping up the pasture, I went upstairs to get Mom over to her window.  When Harold stopped, Cody looked like he tumbled out of the passenger side and headed for the house.  Mom and I looked out the window.  Mom stared down.  We could see the size of the hole in the neck, the crimson spread out on the brown.  Thin forelegs bent at the joint almost as though he was still running.  I could see the heart convulsing on the way it does, maybe forty minutes, even if it’s taken out, but I didn’t know if Mom’s eyes were good enough to catch it.  I couldn’t get dumb Annie’s heart going like that if I pumped her chest and blew her into tomorrow.

I heard Cody on the stairs.  “Grandma?” he called, hoarse-voiced, and I didn’t answer because Mom, she was falling apart, crying and crying on me like a stone dissolving in water, and I held her.  I laughed at first; she’d said she wanted to see.  I looked down at the old buck as I held her, and then Cody came into the room, his face a red blear, sobbing, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.”  Mom was heavy, melted into my arms, her tears all over me until I could hardly stand up.  I looked outside again, and at Cody, then my tears were all over her, and I felt her thick, ancient body on spindly legs giving out beneath her, and the thready blue pulse in her throat buried into mind, as if all the water were blood and flowing together down to Rush Run where the deer drink.