Amazon, What Koolaid Are You Drinking?

So this morning I woke up to an email from Amazon to me as a KDP author asking me to send an email to Hachette basically beating the Amazon drum and spouting the party line.

I’m sorry…what?

While I agree with Amazon as a consumer–I think traditionally published ebooks are often priced way too high–I fail to see why they are under the delusion that I should hop on their bandwagon for this.  This is a fight about traditional publishing.  I am not traditionally published.  I don’t have a horse in this race.  In fact, it benefits me as an indie author for traditional publishers to continue their antiquated and often asinine pricing methods.  My books from $0.99-4.99 look a damn sight more appealing next to those $9.99-$14.99 traditional titles.

So why on earth would I want to email Hachette to bitch about this?  And why would I want to copy Amazon, as if I’m emailing a direct supervisor about some underling’s behavior?  Hachette doesn’t give a damn what I (or the rest of the public) thinks.  An avalanche of emails (and I don’t doubt there will be a lot of KDP authors who don’t think this through and just knee jerk do exactly what Amazon wants) is going to make any difference at all.   This is a business, not publicly elected representatives who can be brought to heel with sufficient public outrage.

It’s just more publicity tactics to distract from the fact that they aren’t being transparent about what all this is REALLY about (because there’s quite a bit of speculation that there’s more than ebook pricing at stake here).

Chuck Wendig has a good post (with links to other good posts) about this, this morning.