Amazon offers a peek at its softer side as it lifts the cover on literary donation program

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From The Seattle Times:

Amazon, arch-nemesis of the bookstore, the behemoth that battled with New York’s publishing houses and transformed the publishing industry, has a softer side.

Its face is Neal Thompson, a 53-year-old author of five books who spends much of his time cutting checks that help underwrite stalls at the Brooklyn Book Festival, cottages at the Hedgebrook writing retreat on Whidbey Island, and a range of authors’ groups, small presses and journals.

Now in its tenth year, the Amazon Literary Partnership, which is administered by Thompson, has dispensed $10 million. On Friday, Amazon for the first time announced a complete list of awardees of this year’s $1 million.

The effort, small by the standards of big corporate donors, is notable for two reasons: Amazon, now the second-largest U.S. company by market capitalization, has a reputation for rarely donating cash as part of its philanthropy efforts, particularly in comparison to its Seattle corporate neighbors. And when it does give, Amazon has historically avoided the spotlight.

That’s changing, for Thompson’s work, and for Amazon, as some inside the company push it to do more, or speak up about work already underway. A corporate reorganization last year moved the literary grant program and some other Amazon groups, which had been independently pursuing philanthropic work, to a centralized team.

“As this company matures, we are continuing to figure out where we fit in that space and how we talk about it,” Thompson said in an interview.

Amazon’s long-running literary donations, meanwhile, have become a major source of financial support for several literary-arts organizations, another sign of how the Seattle company has made itself indispensable in the first industry it upended.

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The story of Amazon’s longest-running philanthropic initiative begins in March 2009, when Slate published an article about Amazon under the headline “The New Scrooge.”

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Slate’s critique, though, drew the attention of Amazon’s top brass. According to an account of the episode in The New Yorker, Chief Executive Jeff Bezos, known as a big thinker with a tendency to micromanage, scrawled “fix this” on a printed copy of Slate’s article. The recipient of that order, and a $1 million budget to carry it out, was Jon Fine.

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Then an executive in Amazon’s book unit who worked to build relationships with publishers and authors, Fine read the article after returning to Seattle from a round of meetings in New York. Industry peers there were wary of Amazon as it broadened its stake in books with new initiatives like in-house publishing and Kindle e-readers.

“I saw the article, and it was juxtaposed with coming back from New York and hearing this clear wariness,” he said. “We started talking, and I suggested, ‘Hey, let’s see if we can address this in some way.’ ”

Fine wrote a memo recommending Amazon demonstrate its goodwill and commitment to the industry. Approval was swift.

“They let me run with it, essentially,” he said.

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Fine, an in-house lawyer at publisher Alfred A. Knopf before joining Amazon, started reaching out to industry contacts.

“Look, we may be disruptive, and you may not agree with everything that we’re doing,” he said, describing the pitch. “But certainly there’s common ground around the idea that creating new works, and the work of new authors, is essential to us continuing the literary tradition here.”

Amy Wheeler, executive director of Hedgebrook, a writing retreat for women on Whidbey Island, heard from Fine through an alumna of the program. “It was kind of out of the blue,” she said.

The two met for coffee at Seattle’s Elliott Bay Book Co., chatting about Hedgebrook’s aims and Amazon’s.

Fine got back in touch shortly after to offer Hedgebrook $25,000. For the retreat, which maintains a 48-acre campus, the gift was the biggest contribution from an organization in its history. Amazon has donated every year since.

Amazon’s program quickly became well known in literary circles, but the company stopped short of promoting it to the general public, a decision that mirrored Amazon’s silence on many issues at the time. When a reporter writing for Salon stumbled upon the scope of the grant program in 2012, Fine and Amazon declined to discuss it.

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Some grant recipients, meanwhile, speculate that the company was trying to keep its distance out of deference to the grantees, lest Amazon, a lightning rod for criticism, trigger some negative attention. (Fine says that didn’t figure into Amazon’s thinking).

“At the time, there was a concern about, would it be like selling out to be in alignment with Amazon?” Wheeler said of the industry’s view.

“I didn’t hold that concern,” she added. “I felt like, if there’s an impetus to do good, that’s always a good thing.”

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Grant recipients say Amazon also has a clear business case for spreading some cash to literary groups. The company has more than a dozen publishing imprints, and a self-publishing platform tied to the Kindle readers, placing it in competition for authors’ works.

Amazon’s rival publishers dispense grants of their own, typically through their marketing groups. Each of the “big five” English-language book publishers donated last year to the National Book Foundation, for example.

“There’s no way it’s 100 percent philanthropy,” Lependorf said of Amazon. “And it doesn’t need to be.”

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Many of Amazon’s grantees are organizations that help authors who previously might have been shut out by traditional publishing gatekeepers or otherwise marginalized. Recipients this year include the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and the Lambda Literary Foundation, which supports LGBT writers. Thompson said he hopes to sharpen that focus.

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Funding for literary organizations, Lependorf said, dried up during the recessions of the 2000s, leaving the federal National Endowment for the Arts and a handful of state and regional foundations as the only consistent major funders.

Amazon’s roughly 50 grants per year, which average about $20,000, are generous in that universe, and can go a long way toward keeping the lights on at outfits typically staffed by volunteers or part-timers.

“The literary sector is often just a teeny fraction of arts funding,” said Ruth Dickey, executive director of Seattle Arts & Lectures, which received $25,000 from Amazon this year. “For us, that’s huge, and a really important investment in our work.”

Link to the rest at The Seattle Times