selling out, in the land of the Amazons

To me, advertising is to art what prostitution is to love; one exists in the negative space of the other. Which is not to say that I find prostitution to be immoral; it's just unfortunate, uninspired. (What I find odd is that advertising is legal and prostitution is not.) And I don't oppose the vigorous and creative promotion of ideas, nor the efforts of the small-time entrepreneur to carve out a niche for himself. But the road is fraught with Faust's temptations at every turn. And what profits a man, when he gains the world and loses his soul along the way?

Ah. And so but how does a humble blogger earn a living? There's Google AdSense: they will brand you with a hot iron if you're interested. Some bloggers sell e-books, which I think is great, although many harmful chemicals are released when e-books are burned. (And any book that no one would want to burn is not really a book.) Some hide behind paywalls, which is kind of like wearing a lot of makeup.

Then there's selling out to Amazon, which is the path I've chosen. Here's how it works: you sign up for an Amazon associates account, and post links on your blog which shoot right over to the Amazon "product" you're referencing. If your reader then purchases the item from Amazon, you get 15% of the total. So, in my previous post on Jonathan Franzen's much-ballyhooed new novel Freedom, I have linked to both this work and to the other books I mention (Franzen's The Corrections, Tolstoy's War and Peace, Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Joyce's Ulysses). Simple text links, no pop-up or image ads, no clutter, nothing. If you're curious to know how, for me, Ulysses changed the fabric of reality (i.e., the template), you'll click on it and be able to order it immediately. Of course, Ulysses is probably the least likely impulse purchase one could possibly make, but anyway.

So yes, if you order a book through my blog, I will profit. Of course, Amazon is destroying independent bookstores, and I don't feel good about it. But actually, I don't care about independent bookstores per se. I care about what they do, and what they do is provide a portal between writer and reader, with (hopefully) a mere diaphane of commercial mediation. As I'm an unfunded writer, and I'm directly speaking to my readers and urging them to step out of the nightmare ("History," says Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, "is a nightmare from which I'm trying to awake"), I don't think this is unethical. Amazon is trying to snare them as customers, and so it's worth it to them to give the profits to me. If my readers have got the pliable steel guts they're going to need to make it in this world, they won't end up Amazombies.

I will soon be setting up a booklist on my blog, as well, which will guide my readers through the land of the flowering canon, and help them distinguish between what is nourishing and what is merely saccharine. I'll include a disclosure, too, concerning my policy of linking to Amazon for books that I reference or recommend.