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Stephen King attacks the NRA in a new Kindle Single
January 25, 2013 | 7:31 pm
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Amazon.com today announced that the best-selling and iconic author Stephen King has published a personal essay—“Guns”—available exclusively in the Kindle Store as a Kindle Single. This essay highlights one of the compelling features of Kindle Singles—they allow top authors to publish their works quickly. “Guns” is available now, exclusively in the Kindle Singles Store (www.amazon.com/kindlesingles) for $0.99.
“I think the issue of an America awash in guns is one every citizen has to think about,” said King. “If this helps provoke constructive debate, I’ve done my job. Once I finished writing ‘Guns’ I wanted it published quickly, and Kindle Singles provided an excellent fit.”
“It’s exciting to offer a way for a brilliant writer like King to publish quickly, and to reach a large audience of loyal readers and new customers,” said David Blum , editor of Kindle Singles. “King finished this essay last Friday morning, and by that night we had accepted it and scheduled for publication today.”
Like all Kindle books, Kindle Singles are “Buy Once, Read Everywhere”—customers can read them on their Kindle, on the web with Kindle Cloud Reader and on free Kindle reading apps for Android, iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, Blackberry, Windows Phone, Windows 8, PC and Mac.
Launched in 2011, Kindle Singles are typically between 5,000 and 30,000 words. Too long for a magazine article and too short for a book, Kindle Singles allow ideas to be expressed at their natural length. Writers can learn more about submitting their work for consideration at www.amazon.com/singlessubmissions.
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How about actually linking to the Single in question?
Relax, Chris. Try clicking on the Kindle Singles link.
This title is $3.02 for Canadian users of amazon.com Kindle store.
I was thinking of purchasing 25 page “opinion piece”, but Amazon.ca has it listed for $2.99
Seriously? No thanks.
Another thought: If the money for this little essay is going towards some cause or other, does it mean that those in other countries (like Canada) are contributing more than Americans.
Yeah, I know. I doubt it.
Jason – Very good question. I’ll look into it. Also, I’ve got a question for you (and Alexander): Do you find that Kindle Singles are often (or always) more expensive for you than they are on the U.S. store? I don’t know why that would be, but I’ll try to look into that, too. And thanks for the heads-up.
Dan – I have only recently been kindly escorted from the American site over to the Canadian one, but in the case of Stephen King, his Single “In the Tall Grass” is cheaper on the .ca site. It’s $2.99 compared to $3.79 on the .com website.
A quick glance shows that to be more of the exception than the rule. Some are priced the same, but many are more expensive up here to the North.
Hey Jason, that’s certainly interesting. Odd, and maybe more than a bit shady, but interesting nonetheless. By the way, did you read Joanna’s piece on the Kindle.ca store? I’d be curious to get your thoughts (Joanna lives in T.O.) —> http://tiny.cc/v34irw
Keep in mind that we don’t have a single gun-killing problem in this country. We have two very different problems.
The one that gets the most attention is by far the smallest, that of crazed, mostly young-male killers invading gun-free zones, typically intent on killing as innocents as possible before killing themselves. Examine those and patterns emerge:
1. Gun-free zones themselves are major factor. Before the fad for that, attacks on schools and the like were extremely rare. Now they’ve become the principal target. The reason is obvious. It you want to end your life with a mass slaughter, you don’t want to get stopped in the first couple of minutes when someone pulls out a concealed weapon.
2. Marital breakdowns. Many of these young male killers come from broken homes. The mix of mental illness and divorce is too much for them.
3. Copy-cat killings. Remember, these people want to go out with a nasty bang. The more attention the politicians and media devote to one killer, the more likely there’ll be another who’ll copy.
4. Violence in entertainment. Crazy people aren’t necessarily violent people. Violent entertainment directs their distorted minds toward violence rather than wearing foil hats and talking of an alien kidnapping.
For an illustration of how entertainment has changed, watch an old Roy Rogers or Gene Autry movie. The description for King’s Gun on Amazons, puts him in that modern category, noting: “Despite his “liberal creds,” King is an unapologetic gun owner himself. He is also the author of a novel–published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman–that has served as a “possible accelerant” for at least four real-life high school shooters.”
To his credit, King yanked those books off the market. But keep in mind that he can get fabulously rich writing other kinds of books. Others, particularly in the movie and game industry would find that harder to do. King gets rich of the weird. They get rich off violence. It’d be more impressed if King’s book were called “Games and Media” and he devoted himself to blasting his colleagues in those fields
The other and far more common form of killing with guns is the result of drug wars in the poor neighborhoods of big cities. That gets almost no media attention because:
1. The victims are mostly poor and black or Hispanic young males. Chicago gets the equivalent of one of those much publicized killings every couple of weekends. Chicago politicians who can’t fix the problems of their own city shouldn’t claim to be able to do so in federal office.
2. Most are in major cities like Chicago and DC with nasty gun-control laws. And if gun control doesn’t stop petty criminals for getting armed (typically illegally since they’re convicted felons), it’s certainly not going to stop a determined crazed killer living in the suburbs. Since that doesn’t fit the prevailing mantra, those killing get ignored.
We can solve the first by dealing with those causal factors. Deal more seriously with mental illness. Forget gun-free zones. Make it as likely that ordinary school has an armed presences as the private schools attended by the rich. Bash politicians and the media for feeding the copycats for personal gain. King could actually do us a bit of good there.
The second needs a different form of gun control. Disarming ordinary people doesn’t disarm criminals who not only have contempt for laws, they have enormous incentives to be armed to protect a stash of drugs worth thousands of dollars. But police patrols can and do cut down on gun violence when they stop, search and take away weapons from gangs on street corners.
This brings up an interesting point from a writer’s perspective. I’ve seen a couple of movies based on Stephen King’s novels, but I’ve never read one of them. It’s my theory that highly successful novel writers break down into two categories.
The first succeed by understanding and covering a topic so well that those who’re knowledgeable in the field are delighted by them. They write on what they know. Those are the sorts of books I love. It is hard work, but that’s the writer I strive to be.
The second are precisely the opposite. They succeed because they’re not merely utterly clueless about topics, they ignorant in precisely the same way that large swaths of the population are ignorant. Their readers like what they write because their books confirm their distorted view of the world.
I recently started a John Grisham novel, The Broker, and quickly discovered that he’s clearly in the second category. When he first described spy satellites buzzing over a country like bees. I gave him a pass. Satellites follow orbits that take them over particularly countries only briefly. But then he had what was obviously a military C-130 taking off from the midwest and flying, nonstop to Italy. That’s when I bailed out.
The C-130 isn’t built for range. It’s built for taking off from short runways. Leaving from the Midwest, it’d barely reach the east coast before running out of fuel. But people who know little about planes tend to have a magical view of them. The C-130 is a big plane, therefore it must be able to fly a long distance. John Grisham didn’t tick me off because he’s obviously stupid about planes. He ticked me off because he’s rich enough to employ fact checkers to get his content right but doesn’t bother. He treats his readers as if they’re stupid too.
The gun debate has that same flavor. The controllers zeal for laws seems strangely devoid of any understanding of what causes gun violence. Rifles, for instance, are used in less that one percent of the violent crimes in this country and so-called assault rifles are only a minority of those. Remove every rifle from the country, and crimes and mass killings would go on unabated. That’s making political debates like John Gresham makes novels.
Someone said King’s mini-book is $2.99. I found it on Amazon for 99 cents. I downloaded the sample and found it too short to be worth the bother of getting. It’s also starts with an attitude I dislike, the sort of sneering, above it all attitude in which a writer attempts to place himself above the fray by criticizing all the parties.
That’s shallow. There’s a reason ‘the right to bear arms’ is listed second in our Bill of Rights. Turning a dispute about that into sneers how this group or that responds to a mass killing is missing out on what really matters in this debate.
I also wonder why there’s so little discussion of why it took the local police 20 minutes to respond to the Sandy Hook killings.
Michael – If you’re American I’m sure you had no problem finding the mini-book for 99 cents.
tl;dr summary for King, “I’m important and NEED guns for my defense; the peons can go screw themselves.”