Shakespeare Regarding the 2013 Writer's Market, The King's English Bookshop, Salt Lake City
We’ve never adopted the “one of everything” philosophy at The King’s English, instead preferring to engage knowledgeable booksellers and to pick and choose titles carefully, hoping to excite curiosity, fire imaginations, scratch some itch readers didn’t even know they had. The fact that our customers are always on our minds enables us to place the right books into the right hands so that each sale is a transaction that pleases everyone—or at least that’s our intention.
Amazon’s intention, on the other hand, is to put the most books into the most hands. Worse, they use books as loss leaders to achieve their stated long-term goal: total control of retail. The competitive methods that feed their “vaulting ambition” (so Shakespeare described Macbeth) involve everything from failing to collect sales tax to bullying publishers, devaluing books in the eyes of the public, manipulating the best-seller list to reflect what they intend to sell, and encouraging customers to use bricks and mortar stores as showrooms—to browse our shelves but buy from Amazon.
–Betsy Burton
owner, The Kings English Bookshop, Salt Lake City
Shakespeare eyeing the contemporary writer's market