Thursday News: Amazon reaffirms it won’t touch a customer’s content; Oyster App try for 30 days; Foz Meadow responds to Penny Arcade; Ominous first lines

JanePublishing NewsAmazon / book business / subscriptions7 Comments

After seeing all the worried reader posts about their Kindle content, I decided to go straight to Amazon and ask for an official statement about the integrity of our purchases. Like many readers, I spend hundreds (actually thousands) of dollars at Amazon and I would not want my content to be deleted because of some purge.

Amazon kindly sent me an email back. (Unlike other retailers)

Even if a book is removed from sale from the Kindle Store, Amazon does not remove books from a customer accounts. If customers have issues accessing any titles in their account, they should contact Customer Service directly and we’d be happy to help.Thanks,SarahSarah GelmanPublic Relations/Amazon.com

As an aside, the reason I was pretty confident no one’s content was being deleted was that because back in 2009, Amazon erased George Orwell’s 1984 from Kindle accounts due to copyright infringement issues. There was a huge amount of anger that arose and out of it, Amazon came out and said that in the future, they would never do that again.

Bezos actually sent a letter to each Kindle user at the time and posted on the Amazon message boards and said as follows:

“This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our “solution” to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we’ve received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.With deep apology to our customers,Jeff BezosFounder & CEOAmazon.com”

Amazon then offered to return the book or get a check for $30. So yeah, I think your Kindle content is pretty secure. However, there’s nothing wrong with making a back up.

**Want to try out Oyster for free?  The iPad App is available for a free 30 day trial period. Don’t forget your thirty day window, though. Set a tickler on your calendar.

This, Right Here, Is The Problem – I thought this was a great essay in response to the Penny Arcade’s cartoon that the only way to sell a female oriented show – Orange Is the New Black – is to tell them there is nudity in it. Increasingly though, I’ve begun to believe that men are doing themselves more harm by reducing themselves into one celled organisms so easily controlled by their little head. Is that really how they want to be perceived?

“Here is the joke: that female nudity is a trump card, more important to men than the lives and personalities of women themselves. Here is the joke: that without female nudity, the show wouldn’t be worth watching for either of them, because ultimately, all its other positive attributes are secondary to, suborned by, the overwhelming prerogative of the male gaze.” shattersnipe: malcontent & rainbows

Ominous First Lines (with tweets) – My tweet stream is full of creative people. When I was browsing the bookstore this morning, I saw a book with the title “If I can’t have you” and thought, that is a really ominous phrase. I encouraged people to share their most ominous openings. I made up this “storify” board so you can read some of the suggested opening lines. It’d be fun to have authors do a flash fiction on these, kind of like Eileen Dreyer did for her blog tour. dearauthor · Storify

The Big Business of Big Hits: How Blockbusters Conquered Movies, TV, and Music – Remember my post about books and The Power of Habit? Basically, hits create hits.

“You see the same dynamics in movies, too. Think about trailers you see in theaters. If you’re seeing a Warner Bros film, the studio might have three of the five trailers. So having a hit helps you create the next hit. If Macmillan publishes Bill O’Reilly’s book “Killing Jesus,” and it sells well, Macmillan can urge him to interview me about my new book [also published with Henry Holt – Macmillan] driving up sales for my book. Hits create hits. And in music? It’s very much the same. One way you see the trickle-down is in concerts. If you are the record label who owns Lady Gaga, and you have a new artist coming up, you can say, “Let’s have the artist play just before Gaga.” Now you’ve exposed the huge Gaga audience to the new artist. It’s similar to showing a trailer before a movie. The hit creates a hit. … So consumers are to blame? As consumers, we are at fault. These are the choices that we’re making. More of us want to see Iron Man III than an artsy film. So studios will make more franchise films. More sequels to sequels.”

Jane

Jane Litte is the founder of Dear Author, a lawyer, and a lover of pencil skirts. She self publishes NA and contemporaries (and publishes with Berkley and Montlake) and spends her downtime reading romances and writing about them. Her TBR pile is much larger than the one shown in the picture and not as pretty. You can reach Jane by email at jane @ dearauthor dot com

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