.
.
© 2002 Hermes Trismegistus "Hermester" Barrington
Member of the
Jackalope Appreciation Circle
This page hosted by
Get your own Free Home Page
|
is a Were-Candirú or Why I Disassociated from Amazon.com I have long enjoyed my association with Amazon.com, but I feel that the time has come to move on. My reasons are multiple, some of them selfless, others completely selfish. I will miss meeting people who come across my reviews on the Amazon site and so are inspired to write me; I have made many new friends in this manner, but I can no longer ignore Amazon's behavior regarding its competitors and the way that it is intent upon swallowing up the market for everything under the sun. Monopoly is not good for cultures, individuals, or markets. Also, they refused to catalog my book Death Trap at La Puente. Slight though it is, it has a real ISBN and everything, and they more or less lied when they told me that they "are not able to do this"--Amazon.com can put whatever it likes in its catalog, no? And so, "majorly dissed" (as Fay put it) by Amazon, I have decided to hawk my reviews and links elsewhere. I'll keep you posted! What follows are the transcripts of my letters to and from Amazon regarding this matter. On April 30, 2007, I sent Mr. Jeff Bezos, via USPS, a copy of my book Death Trap at La Puente and the letter below: Dear Mr. Bezos, I am writing in part to express my appreciation for the fine institution that is Amazon.com. I have long been part of the Amazon community, and derive great pleasure from perusing its pages and buying the products listed therein. I also enjoy the sense of community that my pages at Amazon give me; I have met many interesting people because of the reviews I have written. My Amazon page is located here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A28SSS46U36Q77 I also have a website which is full of links to Amazon.com; I have posted my Amazon reviews to this site, and linked them to the appropriate pages at Amazon. As you can no doubt verify, I bring a number of people each day to Amazon through my website; I have enclosed a sheet showing the number of folks who use my pages as a portal to yours. My website, The Cenotaph of the Jackalope, is located at the following URL: http://www.geocities.com/nodotus/index.html Because of the links that lead from these webpages to your site, and the business that I bring you, I feel that I am not overstepping the boundaries of polite discourse or business etiquette if I ask: might not my own literary effort, Death Trap at La Puente (ISBN 0-9649280-0-0), be added to your catalogue? I like to think that you, a man who decided to start a business in defiance of so called “common sense,” might understand the struggles that a creative mind confronts, whether it be creating an innovative business such as yours or writing a piece of fiction. Like Thomas Alva Edison, don Quijote, and Orson Welles, we flout convention. We deny consensus reality and its imaginary chains. We fly in the face of Reason and play “got your nose!” with him (and Reason, expecting everyone to be as reasonable as he is, never suspects that we are funning him and so spends the rest of the day fretting about his missing facial feature). I have enclosed a copy of my work; it is listed in Books in Print and at your competitor's webpages, as the enclosed printouts demonstrate. I suspect that your time is extremely limited, so if you have time to peruse this work at all, page 9 is really the best place to start. As I travel frequently, the best way to reach me is via my email account, nodotus*yahoo*com. I do hope that you take my request into consideration. I have given a large part of my own creative energy to building webpages; the exact number of links which lead to your site is too time consuming to count, but there are currently 85 pages which lead to your business. The enclosed printouts show the number of consumers and purchases that have used my pages as a gateway to Amazon.com. I have enjoyed my association with Amazon, because it has helped foster my small and odd dreams; I hope that you can comply with this one small request on the part of one of your business partners. Please do me the courtesy of responding within a month of receipt of this missive. Curiously, Hermester Barrington P.S. This may or may not interest you, but I had an early morning dream--those dreams which are most likely to be true prophecy--in which your company was a vast river made up of many currents flowing across the globe. Many packages bounced happily on the waves, buoyed by the wavelets that were scattered across the surface. The peoples standing on the shore would smile, laugh or sing with glee when one of the packages landed at their feet. The meaning of this vision is, I think, clear enough; I only hope that I can contribute to that river of packages bearing gifts to the happy people on your mighty waterway's shores. Having received no response from Mr. Bezos, on June 1st of 2007 I sent the follow up email below: Dear Sir or Madam, Would you please do me the favor of forwarding this email to Mr. Bezos, which concerns a matter on which I have communicated with him previously? I would very much appreciate it. Please feel free to read the email below if you wish or if duty requires. Hermester Barrington, Amazon Associate Dear Mr. Bezos: Late in the month of April 2007, I sent you, through US post, a copy of my novel -Death Trap at La Puente- (ISBN 0964928000) in the hopes that you might select it be catalogued at Amazon.com. As I mention in the letter cut & pasted below, I did not feel that my request was outside the bounds of our business relationship, since I have spent much time--time I have enjoyed immensely--creating webpages that link to to your site. I have brought numerous folks to your pages and generated considerable revenue for your corporation, as the screen shots of the pages I sent you demonstrated, and as you yourself can easily verify. My Amazon.com associate name is aninformarchiv03, and the home page for the website from which I link most of my pages to Amazon.com is http://www.geocities.com/nodotus/ . I have not, however, heard back from you regarding my business proposition. Have you received the copy of my novel, and have you come to a decision regarding whether or not you will add it to your catalog? I could not possibly be objective if I were to detail its virtues, but one of your competitors and Books in Print both recognize its existence, which is reason enough, I feel, to catalog it, as is the fact that I have worked so to bring awareness of your website to those who peruse my website. I hope that I am not being presumptuous in stating that I think it a fitting reward for the revenue I have helped you generate. To sweeten the deal, I would like to propose that any money generated from my links go to a charity upon which we mutually agree. I myself favor the Red Cross; would that be acceptable to you? I know that my novel is waiting in a stack on or near your desk, to be weighed by you, much as the souls of the dead are judged in the Minoan conception of the afterlife. I do hope that we can come to an arrangement that satisfies us both. I have enjoyed being an Amazon Associate these many years; I hope to receive an email to you soon that informs me that you have, indeed, decided to add my humble efforts to your catalog. I thank you again for your time and consideration. Curiously, Hermester Barrington Writer, Paranormalist, Protozoologist P.S. I had another early morning dream about our business relationship; in this dream, Amazon.com was a star rising out of the rainy skies over Seattle, from whence it shone brightly. I was pulling a wagon and I hitched my wagon to that rising star. Higher and higher Amazon's star rose, and brighter and brighter it shone in the dark night, while below millions of people around the globe basked in its light (I suppose the earth would have to be flat for this dream to be literally true, but then I'm not convinced yet that it is not indeed more like a cutting board than it is like a basketball). Then my wagon, too, burst into radiance of a sort of phosphorescent blue, and moved off a little ways from your star--but my wagon, too, burned brightly, not unlike the planet Venus, adding to the light your corporation already created. Thus do I see our business relationship, Mr. Bezos, and I do hope that it is an accurate one. My original letter of April 30th was appended. On June 15th, 2007, I sent yet another follow up letter: Dear Sir or Madam, I am inquiring a second time about the package I sent to Mr. Jeffrey Bezos on April 30th, 2007. Since I have not yet heard him, and since I am an Amazon Associate, perhaps you can help me. Do you have a record of a response to my request that my novel, -Death Trap at La Puente- (ISBN 0964928000), be added to the Amazon catalog? To sum up my arguments below, I have brought quite a bit of revenue to Amazon through my webpages, which I constructed with my own time and money. I am willing to donate any future fees gained from purchases through my links to a charity which Mr. Bezos and I find agreeable; I suggested the Red Cross. I know that Mr. Bezos is a dreamer, as am I, and that dreamers must needs support one another in this wicked world. Please do me the favor of replying to this letter, and forward the same to Mr. Bezos. I have so enjoyed my association with Amazon.com, and hope for many more years as business partners. Please feel free to read the letters below the asterisks if duty or interest impels you to do so. Curiously, Hermester Barrington I received an irritating form letter, as follows: We appreciate your interest in adding new books titles to the Amazon.com store so you can sell them through Amazon Marketplace. Our Create a Product Detail Page feature is a new way of listing your product on Amazon.com. The feature will allow you to list a product in our Amazon.com stores that is not currently found there. Product detail pages created in this way will become a permanent part of our catalog, and you--along with other sellers--can list copies of the product for sale through Amazon Marketplace. We provide step-by-step instructions for creating product detail pages online: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=10683361 At this time the Create a Product Detail Page service is available only to Pro Merchant Subscribers and does entail a monthly fee. The terms of this subscription are posted on the following page: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=1161308 Please let us know if this e-mail resolved your question: If yes, click here: http://www.amazon.com/rsvp-y?c=ydfbthau3365077406 If not, click here: http://www.amazon.com/rsvp-n?c=ydfbthau3365077406&q=h3p2&nc2c=1 Please note: this e-mail was sent from an address that cannot accept incoming e-mail. To contact us about an unrelated issue, please visit the Help section of our web site. Best regards, Doug S. Member Services Amazon.com Advantage My response of June 17th was as cordial as I could make it: Dear Sir or Madam: I already know about the Pro Merchant Subscribers option for adding my novel to the catalog; I would prefer that you all add it yourselves on the basis of our long-standing business relationship, mutual respect, and the fact that Amazon has long fostered the dreamers of extravagant dreamers. I still hope to hear from Mr. Bezos himself on this matter. Curiously, Hermester Barrington I finally got an email from someone capable of speaking in a straightforward manner, even though they were less than truthful: From [email protected], June 17, 2007: I understand that you would like us to add your title to our catalog. Unfortunately, we are not able to do this. There are currently two programs in which to do this. The first you have already been given information on. This would be the Pro Merchant subscription. The second is the Advantage Program. This is a program that lets independent publishers and artists place their titles in our catalog. An Advantage title is given its own detail page in one of our stores, where cover art, reviews, excerpts, and other merchandising information will appear. For this program, we provide order fulfillment. We'll keep copies in our inventory to offer customers immediate availability. For further information, please consult: http://www.amazon.com/advantage The only other option available is to offer your title through one of our distributors. This would make the title available new from Amazon.com. Best regards, Suzanne H. http://www.amazon.com Amazon.com Seller Support I have decided not to respond directly to the poor folks who are forced to make a living by writing letters of the sort above. Instead, my response is as follows: Dear Mr. Bezos, I am so sorry to hear that we could not come to an agreement regarding your adding my epic saga Death Trap at La Puente to your catalog. I understand that you were under no obligation to add it to the catalog, but you might have chosen to do so, out of the respect that I thought that I, one of your most praised reviewers (my reviews were regularly featured as spotlight or most helpful reviews) might deserve a little more consideration than you gave me. The fact that your henchwoman alleged that you all at Amazon could not (as opposed to would not) add my work to your catalog was the deciding factor (for are you not god-king of Amazon.com?). I quote: "I understand that you would like us to add your title to our catalog. Unfortunately, we are not able to do this." Had you or your agent declined graciously and honestly, we might still have a business relationship. As it is, I was compelled to remove all links to Amazon.com from my website, and I am deleting my reviews from your pages and posting them at a competitor's site. I should have known, however, that you would not adress this matter as a man of honor, for I have had another dream. In this dream, I was swimming in the Amazon--not your Amazon, but the actual river the Amazon. As I stood on the river bank as naked as nature made me, I was startled to see that I was the target of a candirú catfish. This rather nasty little organism has the habit of setting its sights on the orifices of warm blooded creatures, slithering into them, and taking up its home there. They can leap out of the water and hit a target fifteen feet away, and have deadly aim. Extraction always involves surgery and quite often amputation. I will leave it to your imagination which orifice this rather unpleasant creature had decided to enter, but I will inform you that I was facing the river at the time--you can make an inference from that. Fortunately, my wife Fayaway, who is trained in Moo Yea Doo by Tiger Yang himself, saw the peril I faced and came to my rescue. Standing on one long muscular leg, she swung the other in the direction of that meat seeking silurian--gave it a roundhouse kick and broke its jaw! As it lay panting and gasping on the shores of the world's mightiest river, we were amazed to see, just before we woke up (Fay and I frequently share our dreams as they happen) that it turned into you! Are you a were-candirú, Mr. Bezos? I hope that you have derived as much pleasure from the letters I have sent you as I have had writing them, despite the fact that you ignored me and disrespected me. I trust that we will never encounter one another in a state of nature. Curiously, Hermester Barrington, Professor of Protozoology, Miskatonic University I realize that Death Trap at La Puente will be counted among my juvenalia, at best, and relegated to the garbage heap of history at worst. Nonetheless, I believe that I deserve some consideration, given the time I have spent in building links to the Amazon website. This, for me, is reason enough to terminate my connection with Amazon. As the earth is my witness, no longer will I do business with were-candirús! Update, January 12, 2008: As of August, I am a partner with Powell's Books. That same month, my mighty publisher paid Amazon.com to include Death Trap at La Puente in its catalog. While at first I considered this a concession and a defeat to Mr. Bezos, my lovely wife (meretricious minx that she is) had a different interpretation: I had in fact "brought Mr. Bezos to his knees to do my bidding and then teabagged him, all for the cost of two movie tickets, a candy bar, and a can of Cheez-Whiz. I sure as hell have never let my dates pay so little for our entertainment, that's for sure! I think you won that one, Hermester!" It is for insights such as these that I consider Fayaway to be one of the wisest and delightful creatures I have ever met--I am indeed, the luckiest man alive! And please take a look at my bookshelf at Powell's! |
Member of the