Those who travel frequently know that different guidebook brands cater to different tastes. If you want American-style hotels and restaurants and don’t mind paying well for them, pick up Fodor. If you don’t mind sweeping off the bugs before you roll out your sleeping bag on a hard youth hostel bench, grab Let’s Go. If you’re on a low but not rock-bottom budget and you want some degree of comfort but nothing fancy, that’s Frommer.

And then there are three major guidebook series for adventure travelers, focusing the experience on offbeat experiences most tourists will never see: Moon, Rough Guides, and Lonely Planet.

Now comes a report of a major scandal at Lonely Planet: Australia’s Daily Telegraph newspaper reports that one of its most published writers, Thomas Kohnstamm, not only violated the company’s firm (and understandable) policy of not accepting comps (freebies from hospitality and tourism organizations seeking good coverage)–but worse, he did his Colombia guidebook from the comfort of San Francisco:

“They didn’t pay me enough to go Colombia,” he said.

“I wrote the book in San Francisco. I got the information from a chick I was dating - an intern in the Colombian Consulate.

This same writer is quoted in a New York Times article on the lives of guidebook writers that one of his highlights last year was going “out partying in Bogotá and met a lot of cool people. It can be kind of addictive.”

Which Thomas Kohnstamm should we believe?

UPDATE
The International Herald Tribune issued a strong denial by Lonely Planet, which turns out to be majority-owned by the BBC.

And it turns out Kohnstamm was not assigned to the part of the Colombia guidebook that requires in-person visits. Lonely Plant Publisher Piers Picard…

called that claim “disingenuous” because he was hired to write about the country’s history, not to travel there to review accommodation and restaurants. That work was done by two other authors.

As a journalist, I can tell you that it is thoroughly possible to do a very good story of that sort without setting foot in a place. Phone or e-mail interviews and some research with validated sources can be plenty.

So why did Kohnstamm claim in the NY Times article that he was partying in Colombia’s capital? What are his real reasons for dragging his own name through the mud in order to apparently discredit Lonely Planet?

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.

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:

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.

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.

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:

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.

Maybe there’s hope for our society. I stopped into Simply Books in the C concourse of Atlanta’s massive Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, not expecting much. After all, most airport bookstores, and even a lot of chain-owned downtown and mall stores lately, cram their shelves with trashy mass-market novels by the likes of Danielle Steel.

I don’t mind a good yarn; I’ve thoroughly enjoyed all the Harry Potter books, Kite Runner, and even the occasional Stephen King–but when I dragged myself through one of Steel’s, I found it one of the most uninteresting and poorly written novels I’d ever encountered.

This bookstore, despite its very limited shelf space, was great. I saw literally dozens of books I’d have been happy to read–including some you may eventually read about in my monthly review column. In my brief foray, I saw these among others:

It is soooo refreshing to see an ariport store whose buyer values intelligent discourse! (And don’t worry, there were plenty of beach novels, too.

Novels have been used to persuade since at least the days of Gulliver’s Travels. Books like Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Huckleberry Finn had a major influence on 19th century social policy; in more modern times, authors from Ayn Rand to Joseph Heller to Phillip Campbell have used novels as a platform for their agenda.

Now comes a novel that teaches the very skills of persuasion–something I’m not sure has been done before (though the late Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea’s Illuminatus trilogy skirts the edges).

Advertising maven Ben Mack’s Poker Without Cards goes deeper into the human psyche than even the very provocative Daniel Quinn, and with the same kind of unexpected mind twists. Set up as a dialogue over several months between Mack’s alter ego Howard W. Campbell and a hospital psychiatrist who believes Campbell holds the key to understanding a particularly difficult case, the book is a page-turner even without trying to have any kind of real plot. The places the two men go in their discussions may change your mind to the whole idea of what’s possible and how the brain actually works–while providing a gripping, if not particularly easy, read.

And speaking of persuasion, he’s managed to persuade people who seldom write blurbs to endorse his book, including not only Wilson himself but also Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Brodie (author of Virus of the Mind as well as the original MS Word) and Internet marketer supreme Mark Joyner, among others.

As a marketer, I recommend this book without hesitation to marketers who want to understand persuasion on a deeper, more personal level than you can get from nonfiction. And as a planetary citizen, I recommend it to consumers who want to understand what’s being done to them by forces they may want to understand.

It’s bad enough that sploggers go around lifting articles and slapping them up on splogs (spam blogs) with no paragraph breaks and a bunch of Google ads.

Now, Business Week reports on professor Philip M. Parker, “author” of 300,000 scraped books.

I am sorry, but setting a computer robot to pull data from a topic is not authorship. While as a multi-source compilation it probably doesn’t qualify legally as theft, it certainly leaves a bad taste in my mouth! Some of “his” reports sell for as much as $495, too.

Yuck!

Most book contracts give the publisher the right to sell at a deep discount to book clubs, and to pay much less to the authors on those sales. However, the assumption is that the book club is a distinct and separate entity.

For example, if one of my publishers, Chelsea Green, sold my Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World to Book of the Month Club, I’d get lower royalties, reflecting the deep discount.

But here’s the ethics problem: The New York Times reports on a lawsuit filed by several authors against their publisher, Regnery Publishing–probably the dominant name in books for those with a conservative worldview.

The authors (Jerome R. Corsi, Bill Gertz, Lt. Col. Robert (Buzz) Patterson, Joel Mowbray and Richard Miniter) accuse Regnery of essentially forming a book club of its own with the express intent of defrauding authors out of royalties due, by channeling as many sales as possible into its book club and other wholly-owned enterprises.

In the lawsuit the authors say that Eagle sells or gives away copies of their books to book clubs, newsletters and other organizations owned by Eagle “to avoid or substantially reduce royalty payments to authors.”

This is a rather nasty form of self-dealing, given the small share authors get even under the best of terms. (Yes, I’m a publisher. I know how much publishers have to invest in a book, yada yada–but I’m also a member of the National Writers Union and I’ve seen the way things are stacked against authors in most book deals.)

While I totally disagree with these authors’ view of world and national politics, if what they say is true, I totally support their drive to get their fair share. Selling inventory to oneself in order to pay pennies on the dollar is unethical and disgusting.

One day after Xing’s

My original letter (and the overall context)

Xing’s first response