By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Publishing

In the last couple of days, quite a number of “players” in the world of publishing have taken a stand against Amazon’s completely unreasonable demand that digital publishers use their digital printer.

Among those lining up: PMA (formerly known as Publishers Marketing Association, in the process of rebranding as Independent Book Publishers Association–the statement doesn’t seem to be on their website as yet), SPAN (Small Publishers of North America)–in a wonderful more-with-honey-than-with-vinegar letter by Scott Flora, and the Authors Guild, in a very strongly worded statement. I expect my own union, the National Writers Union, to join the fray,but haven’t seen a statement yet.

PMA’s Terry Nathan said,

On behalf of all the small and independent publishers whose businesses are in jeopardy, we urge Amazon to reconsider its position. Over the years, Jeff Bezos and his company have given small and independent publishers a level playing field to compete with the largest of companies. Suddenly, this magnificent playing field has been converted into a ‘members only’ club, to the detriment of those very publishers who have contributed to Amazon’s success. We will continue to monitor developments in the weeks ahead.

The company with the most to lose in this brouhaha, Lightning Source, a/k/a LSI, also had a statement. Here’s a piece of it:

Lightning Source has been following the recent press coverage and discussions about Amazon.com
and BookSurge. We are aware of the concern this is causing the publishing community. The issue centers around Amazon.com tying the availability of your books and terms of sale at Amazon.com to the production of books at the Amazon.com subsidiary BookSurge, specifically requiring you to use BookSurge in order to sell on Amazon.

Like you, we are very concerned about any conduct that would serve to limit a publishers choice in supply chain partners and to negatively impact the cost of your products to consumers. We believe that choice and selection of best of class services are critical to the long term success of publishers and a vibrant book market.

Lightning Source continues to provide the highest quality digital on demand print and distribution services for every one of our customers. All your titles continue to be available to all of our channel partners, including Amazon.com, with immediate availability for shipment within 24 hours.

Oh, and here’s the letter I personally wrote to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos:

Dear Mr. Bezos:

As a publisher, an affiliate, an author, a client of Infinity, and a customer, and as someone who devotes an entire chapter in my seventh book, Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers to working with Amazon, I am deeply distressed by your decision to channel all digital-printed books through Booksurge. I believe this is both restraint of trade and an undue burden on your publisher vendors.

Please reconsider a move that will tarnish Amazon’s brand:
Severely impact your long-held brand promise of “Earth’s largest selection”
Create an unfriendly reputation among tens of thousands of authors who have chosen subsidy publishing
Diminish Amazon’s standing as the place of first resort for resources along the middle and end of the “long tail”
Encourage customers, affiliates, and vendors to defect

Unless I receive a response that you are changing your policy no later than April 15, I will be directing my assistant to remove all affiliate links to amazon.com from our nine websites, and replace them with links to BN.com and/or BookSense. As someone who writes about business ethics, I cannot in good conscience stand by idly while you do this.

I will also do my best to disseminate my appeal through the publishing community.

In sadness,
_________________________________________________
Shel Horowitz – 413-586-2388 shel@frugalfun.com
–>Join the Business Ethics Pledge – Ten Years to Change the World,
One Signature at a Time (please tell your friends)

Marketing consulting * copywriting * publishing assistance * speaking
_________________________________________________

Amazon’s response is being widely distributed under the names of several different staffers, and which in my mind is more than a little disingenuous (see the Author’s Guild statement, above, for more believable motivations). My copy was signed by Jennifer Bledsoe.

Let’s hope all these statements will help the “swing votes” among the subsidy houses (who are the first to lose their buy buttons if they don’t kowtow) enough spine to resist this.

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government

Demcoracy Now reports on a particularly nasty initiative to hack into bloggers. Here’s the full report:

Military Considers Recruiting & Hiring Bloggers

In media news, new questions are being raised over the relationship between the Pentagon and bloggers. Wired.com has uncovered a 2006 study written for the U.S. Special Operations Command that suggests the military should clandestinely recruit or hire prominent bloggers. The report stated “Hiring a block of bloggers to verbally attack a specific person or promote a specific message may be worth considering.” The report also suggested the Pentagon hack blogs that promote messages that are antithetical to U.S. interests. The report went on to say: “Hacking the site and subtly changing the messages and data—merely a few words or phrases—may be sufficient to begin destroying the blogger’s credibility with the audience. “

At first I thought it might be an April Fool’s joke, especially when a Google search for pentagon blogging hack didn’t turn up anything useful. But I traced back the quote to its authors, James Kinniburgh and Dorothy Denning, and from there easily located the source document. It’s right there, on page 35.

Is this what we’re paying our tax dollars to fund? For the government to go into our blogs and twist our words for their own purposes? Is this why the founders of our country incorporated the First Amendment? Does anyone else remember what George Orwell’s protagonist Winston Smith did for a living in the totalitarian 1984? He rewrote published newspapers to parrot the government’s current line, working in the “Ministry of Truth”

Bloggers–do NOT stand for this! If I find they’ve been int my blog, I’ll be on the phone with the ACLU and the National Writers Union immediately.

Once again, this administration is using 1984 as a playbook. It’s time to say NO.

PS–to bloggers thinking about taking the Pentagon’s pay for placing soft stories, all I can say is…DONT. The blogosphere is all about credibility; this would kill yours faster than you can say “Armstrong Williams.”

Bloggers need to protest en masse, and make it clear that we will not stand for this.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability

Ethical Corporation magazine, a UK offering that’s always interesting, has a wonderful cheery article on how ethical corporations will fare better in a recession.

This echoes many of the sentiments I discuss in my own award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First–that when you establish customer loyalty based on ethics and sustainability, those customers will give you the benefit of the doubt.

For those who buy on energy efficiency, the higher prices will not be a deterrent compared to long-term savings. And those who seek out fairly traded goods,

Jim Hawker, spokesman for green insurance group IBuyEco, goes as far as to say: “Ethical brands are recession-proof – they are perceived as luxury consumer goods, targeted at a niche market that will be less affected by the credit constraints of a recession.”

In fact, the opportunity is growing, they say–and here’s a conclusion I personally haven’t seen articulated before (and fully support):

According to research by the Climate Group, consumers not only expect leading brands to have strategies in place to tackle climate change issues, but also expect these brands to help consumers develop their own strategies, via the choice of products and services made available to them.

For the companies responding to this demand, it is an exercise in brand building.

I believe this is very much true, and smart companies have been educating their consumers on social issues as they relate to product choices for decades. But I haven’t seen anyone talk about this from a brand-building point of view before, nor have I seen the argument that consumers increasingly rely on these companies to provide that education.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Customer Service as Marketing, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, People Helping People, Publishing, Web 2.0/Social Media

For years, I’ve been a proponent of viral marketing; as one among may examples, it’s the main tool I’ve used to gain support for the Business Ethics Pledge.

One of the best viral marketers I know is Ken McArthur, known for his joint-venture Internet marketing conferences. I met Ken several years ago at one of Fred Gleeck’s book marketing conferences, and then again a few years later at Mark Victor Hansen’s book marketing conference. We’ve stayed in touch. And since meeting him, Ive noticed that he crops up absolutely everywhere.

Yet even though he’s obviously been gong to book marketing conferences for years, he didn’t have a book. Now, he’s finally about to release IMPACT: How to Get Noticed, Motivate Millions and Make a Difference in a Noisy World (yes, its an affiliate link). I’ve been one of his many informal advisors, and even commented to him a few months ago that I also have a book title that ends with “in a Noisy World” (Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World, published in 2000 by Chelsea Green

Frugal marketing genius that he is, Ken wouldn’t be content with an ordinary book launch–so he created one of the most powerful viral marketing ideas I’ve ever seen. I wish I’d thought of it.

You know the concept of internships: students donate labor in exchange for training. Ken has taken this to an extreme: he recruited over 100 people to be his unpaid Internet marketing corps, in exchange for learning all his tricks via a series of conference calls. What a perfect example of the Abundance Principle at work! The six-week program started tonight.

I decided that one of my contributions to the effort would be to chronicle it here. So thus, my key takeaways from call #1:

  • 100 people can have a huge impact in a number of ways, for example all contacting the same key influencer, or divvying up John Kremer’s 1001 Ways to Market Your Book (fewer than 10 ideas per participant)
  • Not only are affiliate commissions an effective motivator, but you can motivate your affiliates further by making the deal open-ended. When people sign up for Ken’s affiliate program, they will not only earn a couple of bucks on the book, but also on all sorts of backend products from now to eternity–products that will pay many times better than the book sale.
  • Ken is providing tasks and thus not only training others but outsourcing the ground work. He asked participants to generate lists of key contacts, blogs, forums, and potential joint venture partners.

    • This is an easy one for me, as I know a lot of people in the independent publishing sector. Except that I can’t really separate influencers from JV partners. But because what he’s doing is newsworthy in the publishing world and in the Internet marketing world, I have a number of people I could approach to let them know about what’s going on, including John Kremer, Dan Poynter, Fern Reiss, Patricia Frey, and Joan Stewart–all very big names in the world he’s trying to reach.

    Ken being Ken, he makes it quite worthwhile to visit his site, offering a truckload of quality resources just for dropping by.

    Is this your chance to learn from a master launcher, without paying thousands of dollars for a product? I think it might just be.

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Publishing

    Angela Adair-Hoy, co-owner of Booklocker, has posted a number of links on her Writers Weekly blog, including an online petition as well as contacts for Amazon execs. If you want to register your protest about the demand to only print at BookSurge, or if you want to better understand the fallacies of such a move (from her perspective as publisher of some 1500 books, go and visit.

    One of the things you’ll see: a public statement by PublishAmerica, which I excerpt here:

    Quite some time ago, sir, long before you were born, American soldiers fought the Battle of the Bulge in Europe. When the 101st Airborne Division found itself surrounded by the enemy, the Germans presented U.S. general McAuliffe with a piece of paper that demanded his surrender.

    McAuliffe looked at it, borrowed a soldier’s pen, wrote in caps, “NUTS!”, then proceeded to win the battle.

    There’s our answer, sir. Couldn’t have said it any better.

    Mind you, this is not an endorsement of PA. I am generally not a fan of PublishAmerica and have warned authors away from their standard contract. But on this, they are right on, and I salute them for being early and public and firm in their opposition.

    My friend Marion Gropen posted to a discussion list that Amazon’s tactics remind her of Standard OIl; it’s a good analogy. Standard Oil’s monopolistic and bullying practices actually caused a years-long anti-trust action by the federal government.

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    By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Business Ethics, General Commentary, Publishing

    Amazon wants to force publishers to use its wholly-owned printer, yesterday’s Wall Street Journal reports. If it thinks this is a good idea, amazon.com needs its collective head examined. I think it’s one of the dumbest moves I’ve heard of in a loooong time.

    Amazon gets a lot of its books through a company called LightningSource, Inc., or LSI–which is owned by Ingram, the 800-pound gorilla in the U.S. book wholesaling world. LSI prints digitally, which enables production of books as they’re ordered, in runs as small as a single book.

    Thousands of publishers, from one-title solopreneurs up to the biggest names in the industry, use LSI for some or all of their printing–in part because it allows flexible inventory management, and in part because the connection with Ingram means any bookstore is automatically set up to special-order those titles.

    LSI has many competitors, though it’s the only one to offer the Ingram connection. Amazon owns a competitor to LSI, called Booksurge/Createspace. And it’s going to force all publishers listing digitally printed books on its site to use this company.

    The Journal reporter sees this move as rosy for Amazon:

    The move will likely generate significant profit for Amazon, which has evolved into a fully vertical book publishing and retail operation.

    Well, ummm, I don’t think so. This is what I see happening instead:

  • Publishers, not a bunch that can be bullied easily (what’s that old saying about never getting into an argument with someone who buys ink by the barrel?), will haul Amazon into court for restraint of trade
  • Publishers who control mailing lists totaling hundreds of thousands of names will tell their public about Amazon’s bullying, and encourage them to buy elsewhere (there’s already quite a bit of rumbling from publishers who say they themselves will shop elsewhere)–they may even get customers to write massive numbers of letters to Amazon saying if you want to keep my business, reverse this policy
  • Subsidy publishers, which print perhaps 50,000 titles per year by mostly unknown authors, have promised those authors to get them listed both with Ingram and with Amazon, and are in a position to orchestrate a massive rebellion
  • Publishers will withdraw book titles from Amazon, severely damaging its brand identity as “Earth’s largest selection”–on which they built their business
  • If Ingram sees Amazon as

    • an enemy, and Ingram is a very powerful company, it will not be pretty

    Of course, I may be wrong. Publishers may choose not to fight Amazon and to print non-exclusively with both LSI for Ingram and Booksurge for Amazon. Or they may simple knuckle under as if they’re John Kerry or Michael Dukakis attacked by Swift Boaters. But I’m betting this comes back to bite Amazon, hard.

    Anti-competitive measures have a way of backfiring. There’s already been some backlash against certain independent bookstores that are demanding authors who do events with them don’t include links to Amazon. Amazon joining the fray will be shooting itself in the foot. The Abundance mentality, which I write about regularly, says it’s smarter to network with your competitors and to build alliances with them than to try to cut their throats, and end up cutting your own.

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics

    Writing in Huffington Post, Hale “Bonddad” Stewart makes a compelling case that business practices need immediate attention–NOW.

    From contaminated meat to toxic toys, Stewart attacks multiple industries.

    And the subprime mortgage crisis, he says, could have been avoided easily if regulators had bothered to pay attention to numerous warnings over many years:

    Edward M. Gramlich, a Federal Reserve governor who died in September, warned nearly seven years ago that a fast-growing new breed of lenders was luring many people into risky mortgages they could not afford.

    But when Mr. Gramlich privately urged Fed examiners to investigate mortgage lenders affiliated with national banks, he was rebuffed by Alan Greenspan, the Fed chairman.

    In 2001, a senior Treasury official, Sheila C. Bair, tried to persuade subprime lenders to adopt a code of “best practices” and to let outside monitors verify their compliance. None of the lenders would agree to the monitors, and many rejected the code itself. Even those who did adopt those practices, Ms. Bair recalled recently, soon let them slip.

    And leaders of a housing advocacy group in California, meeting with Mr. Greenspan in 2004, warned that deception was increasing and unscrupulous practices were spreading.

    Let’s remember the business climate in 2001. A long period of economic growth had crested, business scandals were being exposed everywhere, the economy was heading downward–and plummeted later that year, in the aftermath of 9/11.

    If ever there was a time when it made sense to look at risky lending practices and a baseless assumption of permanent housing price spirals, that would have been the time.

    So why did Greenspan ignore all the warnings?

    –> In my writing, and particularly my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, I repeatedly demonstrate that business ethics is more profitable. Don’t know why this lesson is so hard for some of the “mainstream” players to learn. Wouldn’t it be nice if they all had a conversion and started signing (and taking seriously) the Business Ethics Pledge, in droves?

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    By Posted on Posted in Copywriting

    Specifically, the emotion of empathy.

    I’ve been urging my clients for years to do what they can to be seen as the caring humans they are, and not some faceless corporate monstrosity/bureaucracy.

    Chris Haddad gives some very powerful examples, including the wonderful idea of the “maybe bullet”:

    What’s a “maybe bullet?”

    A “Maybe” bullet is a short statement that “paces” the feelings and emotions that your customer are going through and shows them that you UNDERSTAND them.

    He also gives two specific examples of empathic copy. Go read it.

    In my own copywriting, I often use “perhaps” rather than “maybe.” It does the same thing but sometimes seems more personal–and sometimes I alternate.

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    By Posted on Posted in Media Ethics, Politics

    A lot of people have been dumping on Obama’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, for his remarks about 9-11, his endorsement of Louis Farrakhan, and various other things.

    Obama has consistently publicly and thoroughly distanced himself from Wright’s positions–a clear repudiation even of a close personal friend. Obama also immediately got rid of the key staffer who called Hillary Clinton a “monster.”

    Meanwhile, it looks like a lot of those shaking their fists in the air about this have some reluctance to criticize others who surround themselves with extremists and questionable characters–or, in some cases, are guilty of this behavior themselves.

    You want examples?

  • First of all, Fox (big surprise) took Wright’s remarks wildly out of context, according to Alternet. Wright was quoting someone else, Edward Peck–the white former Ambassador to Iraq (under Jimmy Carter) who might be expected to actually know about such things. And Fox’s camp-followers and parrots in the mainstream media (I don’t consider Fox to be mainstream in spite of its large viewership–it’s politics are extremist, its columnists act as attack dogs who use hate and intimidation, and its journalistic style seeks not the truth but the discrediting of those who disagree) didn’t question this, and repeated the accusation.
  • Clinton herself seemed remarkably unwilling to part company with Geraldine Ferraro, despite Ferraro’s crude racist remarks about Obama.
  • The ever-loathsome Sean Hannity, says Huffington Post, has ties to a neo-Nazi, Hal Turner.
  • And last but certainly not least, John McCain actively went after his endorsement by pastor John Hagee, an open homophobe and right-wing demagogue who is at least as extremist as Wright, and to my mind quite a bit farther out–and why isn’t the mainstream media, or Fox, jumping on McCain for this?
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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics in Government, Politics

    David Patterson, New York’s new governor will never need to stand, ashen-faced, and admit that he cheated on his wife–as his predecessor, Elliot Spitzer did.

    Why? Because, knowing that skeleton was in his closet, Patterson pre-empted it with an act of transparency. He openly admitted, at a time, place, and manner of his own choosing–actually on the very day he was sworn in as governor–hat he and his wife had both had affairs during a difficult time in their relationship. He maintained control of the discourse, and the admission can never be used as a weapon to destroy him, as it would very much do if he’d been suddenly, unexpectedly, “outed.” As Spitzer found out very quickly.

    For all we know, the Pattersons may have even had an agreement that theirs was an open relationship–in which case, the word “cheating” wouldn’t even apply. It’s not cheating if you have permission from the cheatee.

    Transparency is a good strategy whenever there’s an ethics issue. It means you can’t be blackmailed. It means you minimize the hurt to other people. And you stay in control of the situation.

    Almost four years ago, I wrote about a utility company that handled a gas explosion with rare good sense. Like Johnson & Johnson’s handling of the Tylenol poisoning scare years earlier, this company was both transparent and extremely customer-centric, and thus enhanced rather than destroyed its reputation.

    Gay and lesbian activists have understood this for almost 40 years, since the 1969 Stonewall riots. The closest thing to a rational reason for keeping gays out of sensitive jobs (say, those that expose the employee to highly sensitive information) is the fear of blackmail. But when the gay employee is already out of the closet, that weapon fizzles away.

    I’d say that transparency, combined with Nelson Mandela-style reconciliation, creates powerful momentum in favor of the person making the confession, whether in business or politics. Plus, as the Catholics with their confession ritual have understood for centuries, there’s tremendous personal release in not bottling up secrets.

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