A couple of excerpts from a very entertaining New Republic interview that Laura Bennett conducted with literary agent Andrew Wylie, who disdains popular fiction, Amazon and most of the American public.

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Laura Bennett:

Do you feel as hostile toward Amazon as you used to?

Andrew Wylie:

I think that Napoleon was a terrific guy before he started crossing national borders. Over the course of time, his temperament changed, and his behavior was insensitive to the nations he occupied.

Through greed—which it sees differently, as technological development and efficiency for the customer and low price, all that—[Amazon] has walked itself into the position of thinking that it can thrive without the assistance of anyone else. That is megalomania. 

Laura Bennett:

That sounds different from the attitude you had in 2010.

Andrew Wylie:

I didn’t think that [in 2010] the publishing community had properly assessed—particularly in regard to its obligations to writers—what an equitable arrangement would look like. 

And I felt that publishers had made a huge mistake, because they were pressured by Apple and Amazon to make concessions that they shouldn’t have made.

These distribution issues come and go. It wasn’t so long ago that Barnes and Noble was this monster publishing leatherette classics, threatening to put backlists out of print. Amazon will go, and Apple will go, and it’ll all go.

I think we’d be fine if publishers just withdrew their product [from Amazon], frankly. If the terms are unsatisfactory, why continue to do business? You think you’re going to lose thirty percent of your business? Well, that’s OK, because you would have a thirty percent higher margin for seventy percent of your business. You have fewer fools reading your books and you get paid more by those who do. What’s wrong with that?

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Laura Bennett:

Are you really as relaxed about the future of the industry as you sound?

Andrew Wylie:

I am as calm as I’ve ever been in my life. I was concerned for a while. I think everything’s going to work out.

Laura Bennett:

What would you like to see happen?

Andrew Wylie:

The biggest single problem since 1980 has been that the publishing industry has been led by the nose by the retail sector. The industry analyzes its strategies as though it were Procter and Gamble. It’s Hermès. It’s selling to a bunch of effete, educated snobs who read. Not very many people read. Most of them drag their knuckles around and quarrel and make money. We’re selling books. It’s a tiny little business. It doesn’t have to be Walmartized.•