Turning Bookstore Owners into Beggars

"Support the artists" is a kindly phrase, isn't it?

It suggests donation. A tip. Toss some coins in the cup.

Attend a concert as if you're giving to charity. Maybe, after downloading a singer's entire discography, you buy a t-shirt at her website. How generous of you.

After all, what an artist does isn't a necessity. You can live without reading the author's book, or going to a singer's concert.

A doctor? A plumber? A dentist? A baker? You pay for the service. You don't say, "If I like it, I'll buy it." You don't say "support the sanitation man," by feeling sorry for him, and giving him a few dollars tip now and then, while expecting him to haul your trash away for free. You'll be waist-deep in stinking garbage if you play that game!

But these days, not only is the book author expected to keep his day job, write for no advance, or GIVE HIS WIT AWAY ON A FREE BLOG...

...the New York Times reports that it's become common for not just book authors...but BOOKSTORES to beg to stay alive.

Condensed:

"For years, independent bookstores have taken creative steps to fight off challenges from Amazon and the superstores by building in-house espresso bars, hosting members-only lunches with authors and selling birthday cards, toys and trinkets.

In 2013, it has come to this: Asking their customers for donations.

Crowdfunding is sweeping through the bookstore business, the latest tactic for survival in a market that is dominated by Amazon...

In San Francisco, a campaign raised $60,000 on Indiegogo.com in March for a book store facing a rent increase...

Spellbound Children’s Bookshop and Books of Wonder (used) web sites like Indiegogo and Kickstarter....as a last resort.

Josh Mills, the longtime manager of The Bookstore in Chico, Calif., made a public appeal for $35,000 on Indiegogo....

“I felt strange about asking for money that way — baring my soul and sharing my personal business is not what I do,” said Mr. Mills. “Bookstores are sort of an endangered industry for lots of reasons. But it would have left a huge hole in our little community if we had gone away.”

Many customers have shifted their purchases from print books to e-books. Amazon’s market share keeps growing, making it the biggest seller of books in the country. And the price of rent has gone up in city centers. A price war between Amazon and Overstock.com, another online retailer, that flared up last month resulted in print books being discounted even more steeply than usual — sometimes close to 60 percent — a price cut that a small bookstore cannot match. (Amazon and Overstock can make up for their losses on books by selling jewelry, furniture and diapers.)

The American Booksellers Association have 1,632 members, down from about 2,400 members in 2002.

What a world.

Being a plumber, a gas station attendant, a baker...these aren't jobs with a lot of prestige, but they are fairly easy to get, and they pay the rent and preserve dignity. If you choose anything to do with the entertainment industry...even being an electrician for a film studio...you are screwed. If you want to actually BE in the film, you are screwed even worse. Competition is fierce. Starry-eyed wanna-be's are happy to intern for nothing. Actors and actresses who have spent money going to pay-to-play acting schools end up humiliating themselves to get a bit part in an obscure play in a small theater, or one line in an indie movie. Usually they are told they aren't even going to get paid but "it's good exposure."

As for writers...they must face off against scabs who will do the job for free just to photograph or interview a celebrity and people who have day jobs but would be happy as a "hobby" to research a book for a year (at no pay) just to brag about being an author. I sure know of fuckheads who've taken jobs away from me because they were willing to do it for nothing. And publishers know all about this and routinely offer little or no advance for a book, because there will always be some intern or weasel willing to get "the credit," and the money "isn't important" because they're retired, or rich, or have a day job as a lawyer or a lazy professor teaching a few classes, and it would be such a LARK to be a published author.

And now...even the fucking bookstores are going under and having to beg to stay around. Somebody who loves books and wants to have a store where they can sell the work of authors who barely get a decent advance or royalties...and THEY are being screwed.

What will happen next? We're seeing it already...the market flooded with badly written amateurish eBooks...a lack of hard-hitting journalism and well-researched non-fiction...a load of illiterate porn written by idiot housewives...no worthy authors to replace Capote, Vidal, Mailer, and all the other big names.

There was a time when the best-seller list included real writers, ones who were so celebrated they even turned up on talk shows. Now? Now most people couldn't name ANY author besides maybe Rowling, or one of the idiots who knocks off romance garbage...some "50 Shades of Purple Prose" or "Lord of the Boob Job" or maybe geek fiction involving a fantasy world of swords or swordfish or thrones or throwing up. There's no Steinbeck, no Salinger, no nothing out there. Part of it is we live in a sub-literate age, and idiots prefer anime, porn, video games, bad reality shows and worse movies. But part of it is due to Amazon, to a lack of respect for authors and books and bookstores, and to piracy.

Artists...writers...singers...have always had to beg, to audition, to do a lot for free, to knock on the door with enough confidence to be heard but enough humility to be allowed in. Allowed in for what? To be given the lowest price? To be told to pay to play? To be told there will never be an effective writers union to make sure of a decent wage and protection against royalty cheating and against scabs? And now we see that even the bookstore owner is now a beggar. And the beggar is also being told, "Be grateful some take pity on you, and give you some donations." And in the same fetid breath, "But maybe you should just find something else to sell. Like...t-shirts."