Hekate, Amazon and Bitcoin

Sunrise, 1916, Georgia O'Keeffe

We recently have been honored to work with Rosario Melgar O. on a book describing an abduction of family members during the Salvadorean civil war. As a song writer and painter in her native land, we wished to present not only her words, but to illustrate the book with photographs of her paintings, most of which hang, in her honor, along the hallways of the nursing home where she resides.

For ebook distribution, we have worked with a wonderful company over the last five years, ebookpartnership. Matt, the owner, is one of those diamonds in the rough, a patient fellow who understands our varied content. We often resubmit to him amended and re-amended files. We were able to distribute Rosario’s ebook at a very reasonable cost and set a modest price, within the means of readers throughout the world.

For our paperbacks, we have been working with Amazon’s KDP platform as it is the most cost effective means of getting work out there these days, that is, at no cost: It’s software , significantly and maybe insidiously, is also very user friendly. Hekate remains a labor of love and has run in the red from inception.. The relationship with Amazon sometimes comes at a price with respect to what we consider the important issue: Accessibility. Rosario Melgar O’s book, for instance, with its six illustrations and choosing the appropriately thicker white paper stock, accrued a printing cost of thirteen plus dollars per book. Amazon, the behemoth, takes its cut, and in so doing, sets a minimum price around twenty three dollars per book. If Hekate then chooses its price to be twenty five, the royalty payment is a whopping 80 cents per book. The problem is not the royalty. I personally wouldn’t pay twenty three let alone twenty five dollars for any book. Most people wouldn’t. Granted, most of our books are under ten, some even under five, the ones without illustration, or with illustrations that have far less pages, or are black and white. We have hoped, in the future, to distribute softcover books through an independent printer and thereby get Hekate into bookstores. But now, the problem has become: Where are the bookstores?

Bitcoin, and its decentralized blockchain ledger, was created in answer to the economic crisis of 2008, when the relationship of money to its creator, the banks and governments, was called into serious question; when your mortgage and my mortgage was transformed, sliced up into speculative derivatives to be traded, at the hands of a few, leading to the housing-loan crisis which put us into economic tailspin. The remedy had been to use tax dollars, as well as printing more dollars, in order to bail out those responsible, friendly financial entities deemed to big to fail. We are hoping (but not holding our breath) that blockchain systems may, in years to come, make the publishing industry more decentralized, in do doing, take out a portion of these giant “middle men” which have ground under their heels neighborhood bookstores. The technology to do this has been established but is years away in execution. The “middle men,” naturally, don’t like the idea of decentralized anything as it it represents a loss of control and therefore a loss of income. In the same vein, an oil company in the 1970s suppressed the patent for a fuel efficient carburetor. In any case, we can thank the crypto market in a superficial way: The buying and selling of ZCash in 2019 paid Hekate’s distribution costs for the next few years. So there.