French booksellers have called on literary judges to "defend books and not those who threaten them" after Marco Koskas's Bande de Français, which was self-published on Amazon's CreateSpace platform, was among the 17 titles selected to contend for this year's Prix Renaudot, one of the country's most prestigious awards.
Although Koskas has said he was forced to self-publish after being unable to find a French publisher, Syndicat de la librairie française contended that the jury has put them in an impossible position. The novel is available only through Amazon, so it is "technically and commercially almost impossible" for bookshops to stock it.
"Morally, above all, they refuse to 'jump into the wolf's mouth,' " the Syndicat said in a statement, warning that including Bande de Français on the Renaudot longlist "does a disservice to the author himself, as well as to booksellers, and is a worrying sign for the future of book creation and distribution."
Koskas countered that he was "amused and proud" to find himself picked out, adding that Syndicat's call for him to be excluded was a "great lack of fair play, not to say blackmail." He told the Guardian that bookshops should not be angry with him nor with the Renaudot jury, but with the publishers who "made a mistake about my book."
The author also expressed his affection for bookshops, but cautioned that "if they are bookshops where you can't find my books, when I have spent my life writing books, well, let's say that I am becoming less sympathetic to booksellers' plight."
French author Laurent Binet contended the problem wasn't that the title was self-published, but that it was published through Amazon: "For us, literary prizes have an enormous impact and generate a lot of sales, so the stakes are high. In France, our bookshops are doing better than elsewhere because of a very restrictive book policy... and also thanks to our attachment to paper books. The sale of e-books is still marginal. But this relative good health is fragile, and it would take little to destabilize it. And Amazon is clearly seen as the No. 1 threat. The move from the Renaudot is seen as a sort of Amazon Trojan horse."