Boycotting versus Marketing

Boycott – to combine in abstaining from, or preventing dealings with, as a means of intimidation or coercion: to boycott a store ... to abstain from buying or using: to boycott foreign products.

The practice of boycotting has become a method for consumers to join together and fight back against ‘big, bad corporations’ like Walmart and Proctor & Gamble. For authors the ‘big, bad corporation’ (besides the ‘Big Six’ publishers – Hatchette, Macmillan, Penguin, HarperCollins, Random House, and Simon & Schuster) is Amazon. Like consumers who have a general distrust of the secret behind-the-scenes goings-on of large corporations, authors harbor animosity against any publishing giant that ignores their work and seems to stand in the way of their work being published or of selling well after it is published by whatever means.

From trailblazing profiteer to publishing pirateer. It should be noted that the Big Six publishers are often at odds with Amazon, as is Apple, a retail competitor of Amazon. In fact, it seems that almost everyone at some time or another is at odds with Amazon. And sometimes with good reason. Amazon has set itself up as a publisher competitor, having lured away some better-selling authors from the Big Six to create its own stable of authors for its own publishing venture. In a clever and insidious retail ploy to undercut other booksellers, Amazon instituted deep book pricing discounts to lure customers to buy online. Amazon further strong-armed the Big Six into paying to sell their books on Amazon and then took away those publishers’ right to set their own retail price for their books by threatening to stop selling their books if they didn’t agree to whatever terms Amazon wanted to impose. The publishers were then left with profit loss on books that Amazon sold below their overhead-heavy wholesale threshold. Amazon did all this with a multi-faceted market-domination campaign.

But when the Big Six got together with a retail competitor to put a stop to Amazon’s price-bullying, the Department of Justice slapped a suit against them. Looking back on the way Amazon did things, it is easy to label this company as a ‘big, bad corporation’ reminiscent of the robber-barons of the industrial railroad age. It is Amazon-amazing how the DoJ turned a blind eye to Amazon’s underhanded market tactics. Or maybe it was naivety on the part of the Big Six in handing over all the retail work to Amazon, then crying foul when Amazon decided it didn’t need the Big Six to do anything, that it could get the unhappy authors, hire the displaced editors, and start its own publishing arm.

Bookstore owners and ‘box retailers’ like Borders and Best Buy have found themselves at a loss to survive this insidious shift in retail consumer buying habits. In a death-gasp, booksellers have called on their remaining loyal customers to boycott Amazon, and many authors have joined in, rallying for ‘buying local’ instead of feeding the profit-hungry monster they picture Amazon to be – a monster that will stop at nothing, even cutting off its own nose to spite its face just to build and maintain a market advantage. And maybe they are exactly right in this perception. But what does it mean to the individual author who refuses to sell his or her books on Amazon?

Opening the gates to the masses. The Big Six publishers still carry on the practice of accepting only agent-screened book submissions for consideration, and agents only take on books by authors they think they can sell to Big Six or second-tier publishers. Publishers base their acceptance policy on the bottom line – how much profit they can make from sales of each book they accept. Agents make their money by taking 15 percent off the top of royalties paid to authors they represent. (Amazingly, many agents have jumped ship and cut out the publisher by starting their own publishing firms after doing all the author screening and developing ... figuring why did they need the publishers in the first place. But that is for another blog topic.) This means that – until just a few years ago – the majority of authors whose books were not considered viably marketable were left unpublished, with only expensive vanity publishing or subsidy publishing as a self-publishing alternative.

Amazon, in the beginning, based its model of online book sales on charging everyone for the privilege of listing their books on its site. However, Amazon quickly saw the folly in the Big Six publishing model of ‘gate-keeping’ based on sales profit and gradually dispensed with the practice of charging ‘admission’ for the privilege to sell books on its site. At the same time, Amazon developed an automated machine of self-service book uploading and made it available to everyone for free, or for a very affordable nominal cost. That meant that self-publishing and selling books online suddenly became availabe to every author who was formerly shut out of the publishing arena by the Big Six or by the sheer cost of for-profit self-publishing services.

Amazon saw the profit value in a ‘pay when you sell’ model, and the sheer mass of books flooding in for sale would mean profit would come from anything that sold, no matter how good or bad it was. In Amazon’s model, there was no need to pretend that gate-keeping was a method of quality assurance for customers, because the customers would be the quality assessors – but would have to buy the products in order to assess them. So it was a win-win situation for Amazon, and the gates were swung wide open, allowing any author to try his luck at publishing, promoting, and selling his work. The ‘pay when you sell’ model of taking 30 to 65 percent of every book's retail sale has apparently worked very well for Amazon, but the corporation has not stopped there.

Shutting out the competition. Amazon has come up with a new clever ‘exclusive representation’ ploy disguised as a new marketing opportunity for sales-hungry authors. This plan requires authors who sign up for the free Kindle Select program to stop selling titles enrolled in this program on any other retailer’s site. The lure is the ability to give their titles away for free for five days during every 90-day enrollment period in the program. There is also the opportunity to lend the book and get paid for it, even though Amazon would not charge the Amazon Prime customer for borrowing of a title (presumably because the customer has already paid for it up front in the $75 program fee to join the Amazon Prime ‘favored customer’ program). And the book would remain for sale to ‘regular’ customers at the regular price. Authors have jumped at the chance to give their books away while making absolutely no sales, all for the chance to lure readers into looking at their books.

With this three-tier ploy to create a monopoly, Amazon first lured authors to give their stuff away for free in an attempt to attract new customers. While authors were doing that, these new customers were becoming Amazon’s customers. The exclusivity of content and the lure of free content ensured these customers would not be going to any retail competitors for books, thus shutting out all competitors during prime Christmas shopping season. This resulted in authors taking down hundreds of thousands of book titles from other retailer sites, drying up the pool of products available for those retailers to sell. With the sudden disappearance of retail content from Apple’s iBooks site, Barnes & Noble’s online retail site, Googlebooks, Smashwords, Diesel, Kobo, and so on, and Amazon scooping up all these titles and making them available only through the Kindle Select program, Amazon was able to effectively shut out its competition and damage their prime retail selling prospects during the holiday season and after. Already having instituted a Kindle-device-specific format for ebooks, Amazon further controlled the competitive sale of alternate reading devices like the Barnes & Noble Nook.

What does this mean for authors? In looking at the history of Amazon’s behavior in the marketplace, two things become obvious. Amazon recognizes that any group can be utilized as a means to an end. Publishers were lured to the online retail platform and then bullied with it once Amazon had them locked in as the only game in town for ebook sales. When online competition from other retailers began to build, Amazon used its superior marketplace advantage to bully publishers into its profit-loss campaign to undersell and undercut and weaken all competition, including online retailers and physical bookstores, in an attempt to maintain its own market dominance. At the same time, Amazon enlisted the help of hungry and neglected authors to flood the marketplace with alternate content to weaken the publishers’ position as the only provider of content for retail sale. Then Amazon stepped in as an alternate provider of ‘curated’ retail content to offset the flood of uncurated content from self-published authors whose work was not properly prepared for consumer consumption with editing and artistic standards the Big Six publishers had tried to maintain.

So, yes, overall ... Amazon does look like an evil giant corporate monster poised to take over the world. And in giving all authors – ready or not – the opportunity to publish their work, Amazon may appear to have been a benefactor of the literary arts. But the truth is, the deliberate offer of alternate cheap self-publishing opportunities was not an altruistic act, it was just part of a larger profiteering ploy that included killing the competition and weakening the exclusive source of content so Amazon itself could wrangle control of every aspect of the book production chain. Now Amazon stands poised to maintain control over pricing and royalty percentages so that eventually there will be no place else to go. In any market environment, an exclusive monopoly is a bad thing.

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. So, should you, the author, sign up for Amazon’s market exclusive Kindle Select program and pull your books from all other retails for the ‘privilege’ of giving your books away on Amazon?

It’s true that Amazon has built market visibility online that dwarfs every other retailer. It’s true that Amazon has used some underhanded tactics to build that market visibility – often at the expense of content providers. But the old adage about all your eggs has never been truer. You should spread your product far and wide. Use multiple retailers to sell your content. The more places for your books to be seen, the more chances someone new will see it. But also take a lesson from Amazon. Don’t ignore any reasonable opportunity. Even if Amazon sales of your books are higher than anyone else’s, don’t take your books off other retail sites just because the sales revenue is smaller than on Amazon. And just because you don’t like Amazon’s market tactics, don’t pull your books from their site. They are a retailer like anyone else. If they start dictating unreasonable terms, then pull out. But don’t ignore them as a sales opportunity on principle alone. You’ll just be shutting off another source of potential sales of your book. And what’s smart about that? Nothing ... nothing at all.

It’s a business, after all. Your responsibility to yourself and your books is to treat your writing/publishing endeavor as a business. Make business decisions about marketing and selling your books based on what credible information you have available.

If you have multiple books for sale, you can choose one or maybe two books to offer on the Kindle Select program for a trial 90-day period. It’s best not to split up a series and leave part of it on other retail sites, because making only part of a series available to readers that visit those sites will discourage sales if some of the books in the series are not available. If you have only a single series to work with, you’re going to have to decide how important it is for you to try the Kindle Select program. Maybe you’ll decide to remove all the books and put them in the program, or maybe none of them. You have to judge how detrimental it will be to your sales on other retail sites to temporarily remove your books from those sites. If the majority of your sales come from sites other than Amazon, then experimenting with Amazon’s exclusive marketing scheme could actually kill all your sales.

When you sign up for Kindle Select and enroll a title, don’t leave the default set at ‘auto-renew.’ Use your five-day-free promo one day at a time or all at once, whatever seems like the best ploy for you. Broadcast it everywhere – Twitter, Facebook, blog, etc.

Recognize that for every book you give away, most people won’t ever get around to reading it because there will be a download frenzy that will make it physically impossible for everyone to read in the next five years every free download they make. Take minimal pleasure in your ‘apparent’ sales spike for those free-download days, because as soon as the free days are over, so is your sales spike. Take solace in believing that at least a few people will read your book, and others may buy it in response to that temporary sales spike or based on some nice reviews you may, by chance, get from some thoughtful readers. Check your follow-up sales and see if that freebie promo did any real good. If all you get is a bunch of free books given away, and no follow-up sales, then at least you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing you gave it a shot. And then put your trial books back up on the other retail sites where you took them down, and move on.

You can try another book or two in the Kindle Select program, to see if you can break in with a fluke, but don’t expect much lasting sales improvement from this ploy. Always be ready to put your books back on other retail sites when your market experiment concludes – because your main objective is to give all your books the best visibility you can, to get the most sales you can. That’s why you’re in business – to sell your books, not to show some misguided sense of loyalty to one retailer who could turn around tomorrow and eat you for a snack and then move on to the next victim without even a backward glance. That is the nature of the beast, and you must never forget it.

The elephant in the room

There's an elephant in the room. Everyone can see it and hear it and smell it, but nobody wants to acknowledge that it's there. And, nobody wants to deal with it, even though it's eating everyone's peanuts and crapping on everybody. Everyone is afraid to try and do something because they might get STOMPED by the big bad elephant.

Why monopolies are bad ... A really well thought out post about monopolies and the monster that is Amazon (and by comparison Walmart and Google):

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/04/understanding-amazons-strategy.html

Guest Blog: The Americanization of Space Begins at Home

GUEST BLOG

by Walter Knight

Author of the

Science-Fiction Military Humor series

AMERICA'S GALACTIC FOREIGN LEGION

My America’s Galactic Foreign Legion series is about the Americanization of space. America uses it’s culture to defeat the evil aliens. Once you get an alien addicted to Starbucks, they’re yours. I draw parallels with contemporary world events for my science fiction books. Americanization is just another word for globalization.

For example, American consumerism has global reach. The Libyan people are clamoring for iPhones, Nikes, Ford Mustangs, and Eminem CDs. Cubans and Iranians are erecting illegal satellite dishes to catch a glimpse of U.S. Television. Thanks to Yao Ming, some of the NBA’s biggest fans are in China. Beijing honored the now-retired basketball star as its 2005 ‘vanguard worker,’ an award once reserved for Maoist revolutionaries. Seventy percent of Coke drinkers live outside North America. Half of all McDonald’s restaurants are somewhere other than the United States. Walmart has 2,700 stores outside the United States. Ninety percent of all PCs Run Microsoft software. The United States claims six of the world’s top ten universities. The United States accounts for more than one-third of all international patent filings.

On the political front, the US military provides a security umbrella to about half the world’s landmasses, polices the world’s toughest neighborhoods, and serves as the world’s first responder and last line of defense. Because of our restraint, foreign governments invite us onto their territory. Kosovo, Korea, and Kuwait want US troops to maintain regional stability. From Germany to Georgia, those who remember a Europe of concrete walls and iron curtains want US forces on their soil as a hedge against Russia. Those who fear China seek to strengthen ties with the US

America could have conquered the world with its military long ago, but we don’t want to. Many don’t care what happens overseas. It doesn’t matter. Our culture will dominate the world. Like the internet, freedom cannot be contained. Mickey Mouse rolled over Europe and Asia long ago. There are some who feel America is in decline, but they are wrong. America is just hitting its stride on the world stage. Resistance is futile.

Find Walter Knight’s books at Amazon.com and PenumbraPublishing.com!

Walmart's GET IT ON THE SHELF contest

WalMart is hosting a 'get it on the shelf' contest for independent authors and publishers to get the books shelved in WalMart. Voting starts March 7. Walter Knight, author of the humorous military sci-fi series AMERICA'S GALACTIC FOREIGN LEGION has entered a video promoting his series.

PLEASE VOTE - go here - http://www.getontheshelf.com/product/1187/"America's-Galactic-Fore

THE DAY THE WRITING DIED

If Amanda Hocking jumped off a cliff, would you?

Independent authors are all excited about the latest marketing magic of 99-cent ebooks. 99-cent ebooks made Amanda Hocking a star. Amanda Hocking’s a multi-million-dollar author now, all because she innovated the 99-cent ebook.

We cannot argue with Amanda Hocking’s success, but hers was not due simply to a 99-cent book strategy. What many authors fail to realize, she never sold ALL her books at 99-cents, only the first one in a series. And all her series installments were shorter in comparison to a typical novel of 80,000 words. Most were probably not more that 40,000. So, her deal was to get readers hooked on the first installment of the series, then pay more for the rest. And with a dedicated social networking effort, she made success happen.

Many authors have tried to repeat her efforts, but have not met with similar success. And the reason for the lack of duplicate success can be attributed to many things – personality, lack of repeated concerted marketing effort, quality and content of books, targeted readership ... and the list goes on. The truth is, no two authors, no two books are exactly alike, so naturally success is relative and not exactly reproduceable.

How's that 99-cent ebook strategy working out?

The real issue here is the focus on 99-cent ebooks as the key to success. While many authors want to delude themselves into believing this is the only real key to success that matters, in truth it is only a small part of a larger spectrum of strategies to be employed. Yet many authors believe all they have to do is price their book at 99-cents, and success will roll in like a warm summer breeze to invigorate their book sales to the stupendous success of bestsellerdom.

Here are some thoughts on this from a couple authors who, though skeptical, tried this approach, and some opinions from others in the book industry...

http://www.baekdal.com/insights/busted-the-99-cents-book-failed-miserably/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/karen-dionne/why-99cent-ebooks-are-a-b_b_850053.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/20/ebooks-cheap-price_n_1160383.html

http://thebacklight.com/amazon-tablet-kindles-bloggers-infopreneurs/

Here’s a quote from that last blog link...

“I don’t think I’ve spent more than a few dollars on a book or ebook since I got my Kindle several months ago. It’s changed what I read and how much I’m willing to spend. Now I just read whatever’s super cheap and looks interesting.”

Authors, if you missed the import of that quote, here it is again...

“I don’t think I’ve spent more than a few dollars on a book or ebook since I got my Kindle several months ago. It’s changed what I read and how much I’m willing to spend. Now I just read whatever’s super cheap and looks interesting.”

Let’s look at what’s really going on here.

A few years ago, when Apple came on the scene with iTunes, and music downloads became all the rage, something sad happened. This was...

The day the music died.

And so did the music industry. Now it is a former ghost of itself. The days of the big music promoters like Columbia, and later Sony, went by the wayside. Music promoters are still in business, but not like they used to be. And musical artists still make music. Most, like authors, can’t help themselves. It’s in their nature. But many of them have lost the dream of making it big. Now all that’s left is uploading their ‘albums’ to iTunes and hoping for some sales.

And who’s the big winner in this scenario? Apple. Certainly not the big corporations that used to make or break a music star or group. And not the music stars. Only the ones who have the chutzpah to self-promote and finance their own tours and pay for their own recording studio time seem to make it these days. Musicians can still manage to make their albums somehow, but now the only real place to sell their music is on iTunes and other copycat online stores.

The real focus is the technological rite of passage defined by iTunes. Gone are 45s, LPs, eight-tracks, cassettes, transistor radios, boom-boxes, Walkmans ... and CDs are already waving goodbye. Gone are the music stores and media stores and retail aisles selling music CONTENT. The focus is on selling music TECHNOLOGY. Now it’s MP3s making way for MP4s playing on iPods, iPads, iPhones ... i-yi-yi-yi-yi. Technology’s always going to continue to change, but the real issue here is what happens to the content when a technology leader takes control.

Apple ate everyone’s lunch by funneling music CONTENT and DELIVERY through a technology coups. In that way...

Apple dismantled and rebuilt the music industry in its own image. Now, Amazon’s hell-bent on doing the same to the publishing industry.

Amazon is making its content DELIVERY-SPECIFIC so that you can only get Amazon content from Amazon and use it on Amazon technology – while everyone else (except Apple, of course, that has its own proprietary standard) is screaming for technological standards available to everyone in the industry.

In an effort to speed the demise of the publishing industry and take it over before Apple can, Amazon has made ITSELF a publisher as well as a publishing portal for every Tom, Dick, and Jane that ever dreamed of writing a book. The focus here is not on quality, but quantity. Oh, sure, Amazon is hand-picking authors to put in its publishing stable, but the rest of you authors out there, you’re on your own. If you make it, great. If not, oh well, Amazon isn’t going to shed a tear.

Of course, Amazon’s also doing some other sneaky things to try and weed out competitors who are seeing what Amazon’s doing and trying to get a ride on that gravy train. Barnes & Noble, who was once the king of book retaildom, has been scrambling the last few years to establish an online presence to challenge Amazon. Too little too late. So, to fight back, B&N has announced it will not shelve Amazon Publishing books. So what? Amazon’s doing a circle-about and positioning itself to build some retail stores of its own, thumbing its nose at B&N.

Additionally, Amazon is trying to keep its ebook content delivery-specific by tying the content to its brand of technology through not only a unique proprietary format used by no other ebook company, but also by rewarding purchasers of its high-end reader, Kindle Fire, with perks not available to other customers.

Another thing Amazon’s been doing since last November is to invite authors to make their ebook content AMAZON-SPECIFIC, meaning it is available only on Amazon and nowhere else. They have been uproariously successful at this by tantalizing authors with the lure of $700,000 dividends split among the participants, based on the percentage of customer purchases and borrows of their ebook content. The deal is ‘sweetened’ by the offer of allowing authors to GIVE AWAY (that’s right, give away) their content in this program to all Amazon customers on selected days, and all the time for Amazon Prime (paid subscription) customers. And authors are jumping on that like hungry swallows on a cloud of mosquitoes. Why? Because of the PERCEIVED jump in sales ranking on Amazon. The more books people snap up for free, the higher on the ‘desirable’ list an author’s title climbs, giving the impression that it is a ‘bestseller’ when in fact it is a ‘bestfreebie.’ But, to an author who is looking at maybe 100 sales TOPS for the lifetime of his title, this sales ranking may be the only plus in his writing career. A sad but true fact – not simply a conjecture.

What's the point?

So, you authors out there are probably wondering, What’s the point. If I want to see my work published, if I want sales, I pretty much have to toe the line and do whatever it takes – whatever Amazon dictates, because they’re the only real game in town.

Maybe. Maybe not. It’s true that they are trying to take over the playing field as previously described. But if everyone jumps on the bandwagon without knowing where that wagon is headed, when the dust settles, the only one who will finish the trip and still be on the wagon will be ... Amazon.

Why? Because all that’s going to result from Amazon’s latest market ploy is akin to WalMart’s world-wide domination strategy. It is a known fact that when WalMart moves into a community, it brings a homogenized and expanded content at cheaper prices to areas where it was formerly not available, but it also KILLS all other stores in the area, making WalMart the only game in town. Is this a bad thing? It is when WalMart squeezes out other retailers who provide jobs for the community so that WalMart is the only employer in town. Amazon is attempting to do the exact same thing in publishing by becoming the only content distributor in town. They do this by encouraging the following events:

1. Authors will remove their ebook content from other ebook retailers like Barnes & Noble and Smashwords, in effect shriveling the content base these retail distributors have to offer their remaining customers. This will erode the content base of these competitors.

2. Amazon will continue to work against standardization of ebook content delivery, ensuring that any customer who bought a Nook or other ereader will experience enough difficulty finding suitable content that this will further erode the customer base of these competitors.

3. Amazon will continue to dictate pricing in favor of quantity so that very few content providers will benefit greatly, but Amazon will benefit across the board from every content provider.

4. Amazon will continue to favor authors who’ve been previously favored by successful publishers, and ignore other potentially worthy authors who, for whatever reason, cannot get their books to sell like hotcakes at a pancake breakfast fundraiser. That means lesser known authors will not enjoy any of the automated promotion mechanisms in place to reward and promote bestselling books that don’t actually need these promotion mechanisms to achieve sales success (in the same way that publishers promoted successful authors with TV and magazine/newspapers ads and other promotions to keep them on the bestseller list while virtually ignoring midlist and newcomer authors).

5. The end result is that all this flurry to offer books for free and exclusively on Amazon won’t amount to any more success than the author might have seen otherwise, once the dust settles.

From our own experience.

From our own experience with experimentation in Amazon’s program, it is apparent that whatever momentary sales spike certain featured titles have experienced when offered for free, the benefits disappear entirely once the title is no longer offered for free. What this tells us is that, once customers find out they can get something for free, they will no longer pay for it. Not even 99-cents. The only reason they would ever pay $9.99 for any ebook is if they really, really want the book and couldn’t get it for free at a library. And let’s face it, no indie author fits into that category of ‘really, really want it’ enough for anyone to pay mass-market paperback price for an ebook.

The only way authors have found they can fight this trend is to split their books into smaller segments and sell them piecemeal. That means totally revamping ebook content to fit this new segmented sales mentality. Now, instead of a book being 80,000 words, it may only be 30,000. And maybe it will still sell at 99-cents ... modestly. But that 80,000-word book will never again see sales at $2.99 or higher, thanks to a lot of super-desperate indie authors and Amazon. Now nobody has any hope of making decent money off their books unless they can pull an Amanda-Hocking blitz. And we don’t see that happening. Do you? Not at 99-cents, and not for free, certainly.

At 99 cents, a title would have to sell more than eight times as many copies.

At 99 cents, making 35% per sale on Amazon, a title would have to sell more than EIGHT TIMES as many books as it would at $2.99 and 70% per sale. That means if an author is lucky enough to sell 100 copies, the take from a 99-cent price would be a mere $34.65, as opposed to $209.30 at $2.99 – neither of which seems worth all the work it takes to write a book and get a decent cover. Amanda Hocking’s game was to have several different series and several books in each series, for 15 or more titles. Clearly her goal was to sell more than 100 books. But if your only content happens to be one book, then giving it away or selling it for 99 cents isn’t going to make success happen.

What are your thoughts, your strategies?

So, authors, what are your thoughts on this? What are you selling strategies? Does anyone have a plan that seems to be working? Or do you see this as the end of another era...

The day the writing died.

Send us a comment and let us know what you think!

Black Friday Ninja Shopping

The following is a public service announcement to warn families about

the dangers of shopping in Walmart on Black Friday.

DISCLAIMER: This post may contain references

in quotes or excerpts that could 'alienate' some readers.

__________________________________

Everyone in capitalist America who owns a television set knows what BLACK FRIDAY is. But, for those of you who are somehow clueless despite the bombardment of shopping ads all over the media, here's a little background.

Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving, when everyone crazed from cabin fever (being cooped up in the same house with relatives no one wants to see, much less share a meal with) bursts forth in a frenzie to complete official Christmas shopping (because most of them have the day off from work). Black Friday is the retail industry's last great hope of the shopping season for the fiscal year, as traditionally 90% of sales for the year happen on this day. Black Friday is dubbed as such due to the financial accounting reference to 'black' meaning positive revenue, as opposed to 'red' meaning negative revenue or loss (as in, 'Boys, we might as well close up shop. We're in the red, and it's a financial hole so deep, we ain't never gonna crawl out of it').

Because NINJAS (martial arts master assassins armed with stealth silence, invisibility, super speed, swords, and throwing stars) always wear black, it's natural to put the two terms together. Everyone who's ever been trampled in a store sale stampede knows you have to be ruthless like an assassin to get those Christmas shopping bargains before they're all gone. Take no prisoners! This is never more true than in the stores of the global retail giant, WALMART.

Science fiction humorist, WALTER KNIGHT, author of the series AMERICA'S GALACTIC FOREIGN LEGION, has perfected Black Friday Ninja Shopping at Walmart to a science. In his words...

After studying past Black Friday riots, I personally feel only people with a 'black belt in shopping' should venture there. I don't take a cart so I can carry electronic items above my head through narrow isles and past crazed fat ladies and aliens with carts. I pay at the register of the most expensive department (watches & jewelry) to avoid long lines at the front of the store. I use my height to advantage to elbow slow short old people who create deadly delays and bottlenecks. It's called ninja-shopping.
-Walt

To demonstrate the serious dangers of Black Friday shopping, even in the future on distant planet New Colorado overrun with an alien spider population, here's an excerpt from one of Walt's books...


AMERICA'S GALACTIC FOREIGN LEGION
Book 6: Culture War
by Walter Knight
Science Fiction Military Humor

EXCERPT:

The New Gobi City Walmart was purposely built straddling the MDL so that both humans and spiders could shop at the same store. The MDL was painted in red and yellow down the middle of the highly waxed floors. The success of this business model had been expanded to other Walmarts and businesses in the DMZ.

Although the spider Governor of the North Territory tolerated trade between the North and South as a necessary and inherent evil, he was not going to allow the infamous annual Black Friday sale at Walmart to continue another year. Black Friday was the day after the American Turkey Holiday & Feast when Walmart held a huge pre-Christmas sale on all items in the store when the doors opened at the stroke of midnight Thursday.

Thousands of Arthropodan citizens lined up waiting for Walmart’s doors to open. In years past, stampedes resulted in injuries, fights, and heart attacks. Last year there had even been a death by trampling. The governor’s problem with Black Friday was not the good sales at an American store, or the rowdy crowds, or even the mixing of the species at an American-inspired event. His problem was that Arthropodans would be Christmas shopping. It appeared to the governor that, once again, the insidious human pestilence had manipulated Arthropodan habits and culture with American decadence.

If Arthropodans were shopping for Christmas, it meant they were also celebrating Christmas, and all had been lost. The governor was determined that the end of Arthropodan culture on New Colorado would not happen on his watch. Nor would the end be allowed to incubate on New Colorado and to spread to the rest of the Empire. The governor gave the order that Black Friday would be shut down on the Arthropodan side of Walmart.

By Thursday night, many spiders had already pitched tents and formed lines in the parking lot on the north side of the New Gobi Walmart. It was a festive social event. Friends from the outlying districts who had not seen each other since the first of the year at Walmart greeted each other with hugs and plotted shopping strategies. The good mood soured, however, when a company of Arthropodan tanks, armored cars, and infantry marines arrived and deployed between the crowd and the store.
“I am sorry,” announced the spider commander on a public address system. “Access to Walmart is closed. There will be no pre-Christmas shopping allowed at midnight, by order of the governor. The doors will remain locked.”

As a precaution, the front doors were chained and padlocked. The spider commander continued to explain to no avail that Christmas shopping was an American trick to impose Christmas on Arthropodan culture, and would not be allowed. The shoppers booed and hissed and drowned out the commander’s voice. As midnight approached, the crowd grew to thousands. They pressed in on the company of nervous spider marines.

At midnight, a Walmart employee and an Arthropodan marine team leader appeared inside the store and hung up a large ‘CLOSED’ sign on the glass doors. The crowd got louder and more militant, throwing shopping carts and asphalt chunks from the parking lot at the marine armor. However, after a while, the enthusiasm of the crowd started to wane. As the spider commander appealed to their sense of duty and patriotism, spider shoppers started to disperse. Most spiders considered themselves to be a law-abiding and orderly species from a law-abiding and orderly culture. They abhorred mob rule, and a sense of relief swept over shoppers and marines alike as the crowd started going home peacefully.

Then it happened. The spark needed to ignite already frayed tempers was the sight of human pestilence shoppers inside Walmart loading up their shopping carts with boxes of electronic appliances and tech gear. Some Americans waved at the spiders from behind the large plate glass doors. They held up their bargains for the spiders in the parking lot to see. Others just gave the one-fingered salute and giggled.

The taunting was too much for the spider shoppers to accept. Thousands of angry spider shoppers pushed past the marine barrier and smashed the glass doors with concrete from pulled-up light fixtures. They poured into the store, grabbing merchandise off the shelves and from Americans shopping carts. Fights ensued, followed by a nasty riot. More than one spider rioter was run over by angry fat ladies pushing shopping carts. In the end, no one paid for any merchandise. The five-fingered-discount sale ruled the midnight madness. Walmart was emptied of merchandise and trashed. A Merry Christmas was had by all.

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Be careful out there, folks!