“Every year, Jeff Bezos of Amazon invites authors, artists, musicians and other creative people for a secret, swag-laden get together called Campfire,” said Authors United organizer Doug Preston, a writer who lives part time in Santa Fe. “Meanwhile, for the past six months, Amazon has been harming the livelihoods of 2,500 authors by impeding and blocking sale of their books in order to gain leverage in its dispute with the publisher Hachette.”
Diversified Production Services, which produces special events, listed the “featured talent” that year as Neil Armstrong, Man Booker Prize-winner Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale), musician, songwriter and producer T Bone Burnett (Crazy Heart), street artist and graphic designer Shepard Fairey, author and entrepreneur Seth Godin, Czech model and philanthropist Petra Nemcova and Pulitzer Prize Winner Alice Walker (The Color Purple), among others.
Kurt Andersen, a former Time magazine writer... revealed in 2011 that he had attended the gathering in Santa Fe the previous year. His website says he “felt the company [Amazon] was trying to soften up the literary establishment as it moves toward publishing.”
Dennis Johnson, writer/journalist and co-founder of Melville House, the independent publisher in Brooklyn, N.Y., said on his book blog that year, “Well, now that Jeff Bezos is pretty much done destroying American book culture, he’s decided to spend some of his ill-gotten gains on … looking like a champion of writers. Or maybe he just needed to buy some friends.”
The item went on to say that the “Amazon oligarch” had flown authors Michael Chabon, Khaled Hosseini and Neil Gaiman, songwriter Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, and film directors/producers Jason Reitman and Werner Herzog, in addition to Atwood and Walker, to a “think-tanky” event he called the “Amazon Campfire.”
“Nobody knows anything,” he said. The invitees sign nondisclosure statements, and “they’re sticking to them.” Breaking the agreement would be taking your life in your hands, Johnson added, because “he [Bezos] will pursue you.”
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