Amazon and Jeff Bezos Have Been Fighting For Years Over a Book Publishing
Jeff Bezos and Amazon have been battling for years to produce a new winner in the book publishing world. Although the battle had begun years ago, it became much more intense after the success of the best selling book “The Power of Focus”. Bezos has been very open about his desire to publish a best selling book.
This includes that he needs to produce a book that would sell hundreds of thousands of copies within the first year it was released because if this book is not a best seller then his real name could become available. It would become publicly known that Jeff Bezos was behind the best selling book.
Bezos’s secret is that he does not want to be a best selling author because he would have to provide financial support to authors that he does not like. However, Bezos wanted to remain the same writer he has always been. He did not want to change or alter his work to meet expectations from another writer.
This led Bezos to run a campaign which was to get the writers to do their own marketing of the book. So if they wanted to write a book about the best selling author, they were not paid unless they were the first to sell 500 copies of the book.
This group was comprised of many authors including Bob Preach, Larry Kirsch, Tom DeBlouw, Michael Featherstone, John O’Brien, Steve Johnson, Sharon Salzberg, David Goodman, Karen Russell, and many others. It was an attempt to avoid any undue benefit of getting anything from one of the other writers. In fact, these writers were just as excited about this concept as the Amazon Corporation and Jeff Bezos were.
In all fairness, it is the fact that the competition in the publishing industry became fierce. Authors in the publishing industry were aghast when one of the other authors offered a book at least eighty percent less than the Amazon Corporation and Jeff Bezos. The other author took offense and was disgusted by the exploitation of the other authors by the Amazon Corporation and Jeff Bezos.
All books were to include the same cover on all books. When the other author realized they were being ignored, they took out a full page ad in Variety and called Bezos a liar and a con artist. They also stated that they would no longer allow their names to be used for marketing any of the books that had been sold, but were selling themselves.
In the publishing industry, one cannot please all of the people all of the time, so there are times when the publishing industry will just say the publication process is over and there is no more money for the authors. In the case of Amazon and Jeff Bezos, the publishers went on to a series of books that were published. Amazon and Jeff Bezos also stepped aside and allowed the other author to continue to develop her book into what she dreamed of publishing.
