March 29, 2024

Amazon Set to Publish Pop Author

The terms were not disclosed. But Mr. Ferriss said in an interview, “I don’t feel like I’m giving up anything, financially or otherwise,” by signing with Amazon.

Amazon has been publishing books for several years, but its efforts went up several notches in visibility when it brought in the longtime New York editor and agent Laurence Kirshbaum three months ago as head of Amazon Publishing. “I hope we can do some exciting, innovative things,” Mr. Kirshbaum said on Tuesday. “But I don’t want to overpromise.”

Or get his friends in the business worried. “Our success will only help the rest of publishing,” he said.

Traditional publishers do not necessarily believe that. Some are downright nervous about the intentions of Amazon, with its deep pockets and a unparalleled distribution system into tens of millions of living rooms and onto electronic devices.

Some independent bookstores have already said they do not intend to carry any books from the retailer, not wanting to give a dollar to a company they feel is putting them out of business.

Mr. Ferriss’s first book, “The 4-Hour Workweek,” has been on The New York Times Advice best-seller list for 84 weeks, and his second, “The 4-Hour Body,” for 33 weeks. Both are published by Crown, a division of Random House.

Amazon will publish his next work, “The 4-Hour Chef,” in the spring — as a hardcover, an e-book and an audio book.

The 34-year-old Ferriss is a natural choice to be the first Amazon Publishing writer. He is adept at new media (270,000 Twitter followers), expert at publicizing himself (the readers of Wired magazine gave him the self-promoter of the year award in 2008), and a start-up investor who sees nothing but shiny promise in technology.

“Amazon has a one-to-one relationship with every one of their customers,” the writer said. “You can just imagine the possibilities that opens up.”

Mr. Ferriss said he had approached Amazon about a book deal. Crown did not get a chance to match the offer because in the writer’s view, it never could have.

“The opportunity to partner with a technology company that is embracing publishing is very different than partnering with a publisher embracing technology,” he said.

Mr. Ferriss has risen to mass popularity by explaining to readers how to get the most change in their lives for the least amount of effort. His books promise to help readers lose pounds through “safe chemical cocktails” and odd food combinations, gain muscle in a month with only four hours of gym time, produce 15-minute female orgasms, and sleep two hours a day and feel fully rested.

At a moment of great restlessness in publishing, Amazon is offering its own appealing shortcuts to fame and fortune. E-book sales are rising significantly, prompting struggles over royalty rates. Publishers are reluctant to raise them but writers have a useful wedge in Amazon, where they can self-publish and, at least in theory, make more.

Jeff Belle, the Seattle-based vice president of Amazon Publishing, said writers were increasingly approaching Amazon — if not to sign up a book, at least to see how their sales could be improved. “There are a number of high-profile authors who reach out to us regularly,” he said.

Other retailers, including Barnes Noble and Borders chains, have made occasional forays into publishing classics, but they have amounted to little. Amazon has much deeper pockets and a long-term strategy.

Victoria Barnsley, chief executive of HarperCollins UK, told the BBC this week that Amazon’s foray into book publishing “is obviously a concern.”

The retailer, she added, was both friend and enemy mixed together: “They are also a very important customer of ours and they have done fantastic things for the book industry. I have mixed views about them but there’s no doubt they are very, very powerful now and in fact they are getting close to being in a monopolistic situation.”

Richard Curtis, a New York agent and longtime observer of the publishing scene, takes a slightly more benign view. “I’m not so convinced that this is the end of the world the way so many doomsayers are saying,” he said.

“There is lots of conventional business being done by conventional publishers on conventional terms, and the books are being published on conventional paper with conventional royalties. What we’ll see for a long time is an amalgam of the two approaches, digital and traditional.”

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Arts & Leisure: Black-and-White Struggle With a Rosy Glow

Inside the museum footprints of many of the marchers are captured in concrete, Mann’s Chinese Theater-style, along with garments from that day’s fateful confrontation. There’s a model of a Selma jail cell around the early ’60s, where scores of arrested protesters were crammed together, and black-and-white photographs that document the day’s odd mix of hope and brutality.

Holding the many exhibits together, providing context and testimony, are television screens playing the “Bridge to Freedom” episode of the documentary “Eyes on the Prize,” a monumental 14-hour television series that wove news and documentary footage, photographs and first-person interviews into the most ambitious cinematic narrative of the movement to date. Created by Henry Hampton for PBS, it was shown in two parts in 1987 and 1990, but, unfortunately, because of issues with copyright holders the film only became more widely available beginning in 2006.

In this breach all manner of documentary and feature films, from earnest biographies to goofy musicals, have tried to illuminate, not just this period of American history, but also the myriad ways in which humans react when faced with profound moral choices. The latest cinematic endeavor is a feature adaptation of “The Help,” a 2009 novel by Kathryn Stockett that has been on the best-seller list pretty much since its release and has been published in 35 countries.

Crucial to the novel’s success, just as it was in “Eyes,” was the narrative point of view. Hampton’s documentary slides powerfully from one witness to another, giving little-known organizers equal weight with the Dr. Kings and Rosa Parkses of the movement. Ms. Stockett, a white woman who toiled for five years on “The Help,” uses the voices of three women (Skeeter, an emerging white liberal writer, and Minny and Aibileen, two black maids she persuades to tell their stories) to telescope a wide range of emotions and experiences in the Jim Crow Mississippi of 1962. If Skeeter is Ms. Stockett’s stand-in, then she makes a bold stretch by using local dialect to voice the experiences of the black women, creating a false sense of authenticity that’s vital to the novel.

In the film adaptation the director-writer Tate Taylor, a childhood friend of Ms. Stockett’s, adopts a clever strategy. The film opens and closes with voice-over narration by Viola Davis’s Aibileen, and her voice is interspersed throughout the film. But the narrative is driven by Skeeter’s journey from oddball college graduate to rebellious neo-liberal muckraker, action that happens in the book but is given more prominence in the stripped-down screenplay structure. Minny, played with great wit by Octavia Spencer, is still a huge part of the film, but her narrative voice is sublimated to Aibileen’s and Skeeter’s, which may simply be the difference between a sprawling novel and a Hollywood feature.

A larger problem for anyone interested in the true social drama of the era is that the film’s candy-coated cinematography and anachronistic super-skinny Southern belles are part of a strategy that buffers viewers from the era’s violence. The maids who tell Skeeter their stories speak of the risks they are taking, but the sense of physical danger that hovered over the civil rights movement is mostly absent.

Medgar Evers is murdered in Jackson during the course of the story, but it is more a TV event, very much like the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, than a felt tragedy. The only physical violence inflicted on any of the central characters is a beating Minny endures at the hands of a heard, but unseen, husband. At its core the film is a small domestic drama that sketches in the society surrounding its characters but avoids looking into the shadows just outside the frame.

Nelson George is a filmmaker and author. His novel, “The Plot Against Hip Hop,” and documentary, “Brooklyn Boheme,” will both be released this fall.

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