Statement About Amazon

Dear Reader

Today I removed all links to Amazon Corporation from this website. It was like flicking a particularly irritating imp from my shoulder and kicking it out of the door. It’s still out there, grinning and rubbing its hands together and, if I listen hard enough I can hear its execrable voice squeaking, “I still have all your readers, and there’s nothing you can do about it!”

It’s time to silence the imp for good. On behalf of independent book stores everywhere, writers who have decided to devote themselves to a cause or just the love of writing, readers who want to reject the most virulent corporate cancer in the publishing world, and anyone who prefers “Small is Beautiful” over “Big is Best”, I am going further.

Today I will be contacting the publishers of both Underminers and Time’s Up! and asking them to do everything in their power to remove the listings of those books from every Amazon database, and cease sales of those titles through Amazon Corp. and its regional equivalents.

I may not succeed, but I will have done my best. It is still my desire to ensure as many people as possible get to read these books, which is why I have always offered online equivalents to read on web pages or downloadable text. But I appreciate that many people, like me, love the tangible quality of the book – its feel in the hand; the sound of turning leaves and echo of a dialogue between author and reader; even the smell of the book, the memories of its last resting place, resident in the fibres of every open page.

You deserve that choice: new, used, old, infirm and falling to pieces, or cherished on a shelf waiting for the next reader to come along and see what is inside.

Can I ask that we make a deal? I will do what I can to de-Amazon my books; and you, please tell everyone not to use this corporate behemoth, and give the little people, the people who are like us, a chance.

Yours

Keith Farnish

Author and Campaigner

Update 28 June: My publishers have responded and are trying their very best, but hamstrung by the wholesalers, who have no qualms about selling to Amazon because they are also massive companies. However, UIT have withdrawn “Time’s Up!” from direct sale via Amazon Advantage, which is a start…