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Publishing’s Ecosystem on the Brink: The Backstory

The Authors Guild — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:40:07 +0000

Subtlety is out. Bloomberg Businessweek’s January 25th cover shows a book engulfed in flames. The book’s title? “Amazon Wants to Burn the Book Business.” A towering pile of books dominates the front page of Sunday’s NYT Business Section. The pile starts well below the fold (print edition), breaks through the section header at the top of the page, and leans precariously. Books are starting to tumble off. “The Bookstore’s Last Stand,” reads the headline.

These stories capture pretty well the state of book publishing: this appears to be no ordinary, cyclical crisis that future authors and publishers will shrug off. To understand how the book industry got into this predicament, however, a broader perspective may be needed. The cover story of February’s Harper’s Magazine provides that, discussing a fundamental shift in the federal approach to antitrust law that’s affected bookselling and countless other industries. It’s a story that hasn’t previously been told in a major periodical, to our knowledge.

We’ll get to that in a moment. First, let’s set the stage with the other two stories.

Burning Down the Houses

Brad Stone’s Businessweek story discusses Amazon’s campaign to prevent other booksellers from securing a foothold in the booming e-book market and the company’s furious reaction to Random House’s decision last March to adopt agency pricing for e-books, just as five of the other “Big Six” trade publishers had the previous year. (Before agency pricing, Amazon could sell e-books from Big Six publishers at deep discounts, taking losses at a rate that Barnes & Noble could never afford to match. See How Apple Saved Barnes & Noble, Probably for more.)

Mr. Stone writes that after Random House’s March 2011 agency-pricing announcement,

Amazon could no longer run the best play out of its playbook – slash prices and sustain losses in the short term to gain market share over the long term. … “For the first time, a level playing field was going to get forced on Amazon,” says James Gray [of UK bookseller John Smith & Son and formerly of Ingram Content Group]. Amazon execs “were basically spitting blood and nails.”

Amazon’s response to Random House’s move was stunning and swift:

The next month, an Amazon recruiter sent an e-mail to several editors at big publishing houses, looking for someone to launch a new New York-based publishing imprint. “The imprint will be supported with a large budget, and its success will directly impact the success of Amazon’s overall business,” read the e-mail, which was obtained by Bloomberg Businessweek.

Even with a large budget, directly affecting the success of Amazon’s overall business is a tall order for a new publishing imprint. Amazon pulled in well north of $40 billion in revenue last year (final numbers aren’t yet in), dwarfing the combined revenues of the Big Six publishers.

Luring a substantial contingent of bestselling authors away from the Big Six seems the only plausible route for an imprint to affect Amazon’s overall business. Amazon needed someone with a substantial industry pedigree to pull this off. Amazon quickly – in time for last spring’s Book Expo America — landed just the man for the job: Larry Kirshbaum, formerly of Warner Books.

Just three months after Random House’s announcement, Amazon had all but declared war on the six unruly members of its book supply chain. Jeff Bezos had $6 billion in cash, the patience to absorb losses for years, and a former Big Six chief to lead the fight. The long-running behind-the-scenes battle for control of the publishing industry had finally broken into full public view.

Barnes & Noble’s New Role: The Contender

While Amazon directly threatens traditional publishers with its new imprint, it continues to undermine the ecosystem on which book publishers, and most new authors, depend. Julie Bosman describes this well in her NYT article, focusing on the last remaining brick-and-mortar bookseller with nationwide clout:

Without Barnes & Noble, the publishers’ marketing proposition crumbles. The idea that publishers can spot, mold and publicize new talent, then get someone to buy books at prices that actually makes economic sense suddenly seems a reach. …

What publishers count on from bookstores is the browsing effect. Surveys indicate that only a third of the people who step into a bookstore and walk out with a book actually arrived with the specific desire to buy one.

“That display space they have in the store is really one of the most valuable places that exists in this country for communicating to the consumer that a book is a big deal,” said Madeline McIntosh, president of sales, operations and digital for Random House.

Established authors, for the most part, do fine selling through online bookstores. It’s new authors who lose out if browsing in bookstores becomes a thing of the past. Advances for unproven and non-bestselling authors have already plummeted, by all accounts. Literary diversity is at risk.

To understand just how precarious things are, realize that last year’s Borders’ bankruptcy represented an enormous reduction in browsing space, shuttering 650 stores. (B&N has about 700 stores.) One benefit of the loss of Borders should have been a short-term lift to B&N’s 700 stores and the 1,500 or so remaining independent bookstores. B&N’s sales were indeed up in the nine weeks before Christmas, Ms. Bosman reports. How much? Borders’ collapse led to a bounce of just four percent, compared to the prior Christmas. That’s what’s passing for good news in brick-and-mortar bookselling at the moment.

There is a bright spot, however. Barnes & Noble, led by William Lynch, has exceeded all expectations in the past two years with its launch of the Nook. B&N’s 300-member Silicon Valley office, after giving Amazon’s Kindle developers a two-year head start, beat Amazon to the tablet market by fully twelve months, and introduced what’s generally seen as the state-of-the-art e-ink reader, the Nook Simple Touch, eight months ago.

B&N, in other words, has been out-engineering Amazon, and Ms. Bosman’s story is the best account we’ve had of B&N’s efforts. In the process, B&N has seen its e-book market share climb from zero, two Christmases ago, to roughly 27% today.

B&N remains vulnerable, however. The engineering race against Amazon continues, and Amazon has leverage for acquiring content for its Kindle (see Contracts on Fire: Amazon’s Lending Library Mess) that B&N can’t match. And, critically, one tool that should help B&N, our antitrust laws, is instead poised to undo it.

This brings us to an unlikely tale of books, chickens, beer, and a Silicon Valley gentlemen’s agreement.

The Backstory: Amazon, Chicken Processors & Silicon Valley

Harper’s cover art rivals Businessweek’s: an enormous businessman wearing a gray pinstriped suit is preparing to literally eat the competition, a jumbo handful of gray-suited men and women. In the article, “Killing the Competition: How the New Monopolies Are Destroying Open Markets,” (key excerpts at link, full article by subscription) Barry Lynn views the state of book publishing through a different lens.

Mr. Lynn makes the case that Amazon’s dominance isn’t just a story of an industry disrupted by online commerce and digital upheaval, it’s about the abandoning of New Deal era protections of retailers in 1975 (promoted by backers as a means to fight inflation, says Mr. Lynn) and what he portrays as a shift in 1981 in the Justice Department’s interpretation of antitrust law based on “Chicago School” theories of efficiency and consumer welfare. The upshot appears to be that non-consumer markets (business-to-business markets and labor markets) are often insufficiently protected from monopolies.

To a chicken grower, for example, the relevant market isn’t restaurants or household consumers of chicken, it’s the market of chicken processors. Through a variety of machinations, including long-term contracts and the physical placement of processing plants (think baseball, before free agency), chicken growers now routinely have a market of only one processor to sell to.

Chicken growers own their land, buildings, and equipment, and all of the debt and risk that go with them, but these entrepreneurs have no real control over their economic lives. Growers buy their chicks and feed from their poultry processor, for example, and processors often require growers to make new investments in buildings and equipment. The processors, Mr. Lynn seems to suggest, have something much better than mere capital: the economic power to dictate how others use theirs.

It’s not just chicken growers who face constrained markets, Mr. Lynn writes. In free-wheeling Silicon Valley, computer engineers and digital animation workers employed by Apple, Google, Intel, and Pixar, among others, were subject to a secret agreement not to bid on each others’ employees, according to a Justice Department lawsuit filed, and settled, in 2010. (On Friday, former employees of some of the companies filed an antitrust lawsuit in federal court in San Jose based on the Justice Department investigation.)

It’s even hit beer. The 1,750 U.S. microbrewers may appear to operate in a competitive environment, but they nearly all sell through two distributors: ABI and MillerCoors control 90% of the distribution market.

For book publishers, the relevant market isn’t readers (direct sales are few), but booksellers, and Amazon has firm control of bookselling’s online future as it works to undermine bookselling’s remaining brick-and-mortar infrastructure. Amazon controls every growing segment of the industry: online physical books, downloadable audio books, online used books, and e-books. Amazon commands about 75% of the online market for print books, and 60% of the e-book market (a percentage that decreased from Amazon’s reported 90% two years ago, as a result of agency pricing).

Mr. Lynn reports on a conversation with the head of one of the largest publishing houses in the U.S.:

He explained that Amazon was once a “wonderful customer with whom to do business.” As Jeff Bezos’s company became more powerful, however, it changed. “The question is, do you wear your power lightly? … Mr. Bezos has not. He is reckless. He is dangerous.”

The head of a small publishing house in Manhattan, Mr. Lynn reports, was even more blunt:

“Amazon is a bully,” he said, his voice rising, his cheeks flushing. “Anyone who gets that powerful can push people around, and Amazon pushes people around. They do not exercise their power responsibly.”

Neither man allowed me to use his name. Amazon, they made clear, had long since accumulated sufficient influence over their business to ensure that even these most dedicated defenders of the book – and of the First Amendment – dare not speak openly of the company’s predations.

Mr. Lynn then turns to Amazon’s blackout of Macmillan’s buy buttons, two years ago this week:

At the time, Amazon and Macmillan were scrapping over which firm would set the price for Macmillan’s e-books. Amazon wanted to price every Macmillan e-book, and indeed every e-book of every publisher, at $9.99 or less. This scorched-earth tactic, which guaranteed that Amazon lost money on many of the e-books it sold, was designed to cement the online retailer’s dominance in the nascent market. It also had the effect of persuading customers that this deeply discounted price, which publishers considered ruinously low, was the “natural” one for an e-book.

In January 2010, Macmillan at last claimed the right to set the price for each of its own products as it alone saw fit. Amazon resisted this arrangement, known in publishing as the “agency model.” When the two companies deadlocked, Amazon simply turned off the buttons that allowed customers to order Macmillan titles, in both their print and their e-book versions. The reasoning was obvious: the sudden loss of sales, which could amount to a sizable fraction of Macmillan’s total revenue, would soon bring the publisher to heel.

This was not the first time Amazon had used this stratagem. The retailer’s executives had previously cut off small firms such as Ten Speed Press and Melville House Publishing for bucking their will. But the fight with Macmillan was by far the most public of these showdowns.

In the late 1970s, when a single book retailer first captured a 10 percent share of the U.S. market, Congress and the regulatory agencies were swift to react. As the head of the Federal Trade Commission put it: “The First Amendment protects us from the chilling shadow of government interference with the media. But are there comparable dangers if other powerful economic or political institutions assume control…?”

***

Today, … a single private company has captured the ability to dictate terms to the people who publish our books, and hence to the people who write and read our books. It does so by employing the most blatant forms of predatory pricing to destroy its retail competitors. … [It] justifies its exercise of raw power in the same way our economic autocrats always do: it claims that the resulting “efficiencies” will serve the interests of the consumer.

The book industry is in play, and has been for a while. The good news is that people are finally starting to pay attention.

Thanks for y’all’s stick-to-it-iveness

Wynn Wagner — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 22:15:35 +0000

According to a spreadsheet from Dreamspinner Press, books two and three of my Vamp Camp series are selling about as well as the first volume.

I sort of expected people might try the first book but we’d thin out all except the die-hards before the third volume. That hasn’t happened, and I am as grateful for that as I know how to be.

Vamp Camp is the sales leader again this month, and that’s to be expected. It is the first book in the series. It’s the one without any baggage from earlier reads.

The Obscurati and The Vamp in the Silver Mask are right up there, almost tied with the first book.

Book four is coming up in early March. Fangs over America continues the series and is more self-contained than the earlier books. It’s funnier and has a little less explicit sex than the others. I hope you like it.

What I mainly wanted to say was THANKS for taking the time to invest in these vampires. I am as grateful to you as I know how to be.

God Bless the Inept Right

Wynn Wagner — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 21:11:43 +0000

God bless inept right-wingers.

I’d be more worried if they were smart (like Nixon was). Newt thinks he’s smart and has a few media’oids convinced, He really just good at slapping other people with wet towels. He’s suddenly an expert on what he calls “traditional marriage.” Maybe he’s an expert: he’s been in enough of them.

At one debate between Republican candidates, he said the government has the duty to protect the Sacrament of Marriage. He used the term Sacrament twice, to show how much he was in support of this aspect of marriage. Once could have been a mistake. Twice is a pattern.

The government has no business supporting or preventing any kind of Sacrament. That’s a church term, and traditional liturgical Christian churches have several: Eucharist, Absolution, Holy Orders, Unction, Baptism, Confirmation and Matrimony.

The minute the government gets into the Sacrament business — as Newt wants — it is violating the US Constitution. The government supporting one church’s sacraments over another is illegal in the United States, but that’s what this self-styled historian wants to do.

The Constitution was written to protect Deist citizens — like Thomas Jefferson — from Crusaders like Newt Gingrich. He considers himself to be as much an expert on religion as he is on marriage. In his defense, he has the same creds on that subject. He’s had as many church memberships as he has marriages. He was born into a Lutheran family but converted to Southern Baptist at some later point. He’s currently a member of the Roman Catholic church.

All those marriages must have made joining the Romans an interesting discussion. Does the Roman church just disallow divorce if you don’t have… on, who the hell knows (or cares)–.

I wish Newt the best of luck in the primary. It will make the POTUS season really fun to watch.

Let Nobody Put Asunder

JohnSelig — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 15:37:33 +0000

John Selig is an activist for equality and justice. He and his husband — Rodolfo — life in Dallas. John produces a widely-followed and acclaimed podcast called Outspoken. You can hookup with John on Facebook or at his personal website, John Selig Outspoken.

Warning, John is on a tear! (but I have good reason to be). I am sending this to you because you really do matter to me.

Today has been an extremely difficult day, perhaps the worst I have suffered in many years. I was part of a lay-off from my job back in November and this is far worse than that.

This morning I received terrible news from Nathaniel (my son for those of you who don’t know him) who lives in Nova Scotia. The Globe and Mail, a major newspaper in Canada, was reporting that gay couples such as Rodolfo and myself who lived in a state or country that didn’t support same-sex marriage were no longer going to be considered legally married in Canada which essentially dissolved Rodolfo’s and my marriage. We will be celebrating our eighth anniversary on April 17th. [1]

To say that I was devastated is a huge understatement. I spent the day getting out paperwork focusing on my job search while I worked hard to hold back tears.

Late this afternoon, I received a much more reassuring email Major LGBT and other Organizations (including Freedom to Marry, NCLR — The National Center for Lesbian Rights, GLAD – Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, Lambda Legal and The ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union). [2]

Dan Savage wrote a superb column for The Stranger, a newspaper in Seattle where he serves as editor, writes his nationally acclaimed sex-advise column and records his excellent podcast. Dan’s column was picked up by the Huffington Post and it outlines his accumulation of information on this news story throughout today. Dan is an excellent writer, speaker ad podcaster and a personal hero of mine. His language is salty for those of you reading this who might be offended, be forewarned. By the way Dan and his husband Terry started the It Get’s Better Project aimed at keeping LGBT youth from killing themselves. Thousands of people have recorded messages including many celebrities, sports heroes and even President Obama have recorded messages. [3]

Here are my takeaways from this horrible day:

I am tired of being treated like a third-class person. Rodolfo and I deserve the same rights as all other Americans.
I am tired and disgusted by the hate that continues against us. I am particularly disgusted by the hateful comments from the Republican contenders for their presidential candidacy. I am disgusted that mainstream Republicans and more liberally minded religious leaders aren’t calling them on their hate speech in the media. My father and his family fled Nazi German in 1935 as Jews as others stood by and did nothing.
I am tired and disgusted by the fact that Rodolfo and I, who have been together for 10 years as of last month are denied over 1,140 federal rights that legally married heterosexual couples have. Marriage needs to be recognized on the federal level and the Defense of Marriage Act needs to be overturned. It is not a state issue. No religion will or should be forced to accept same-sex marriage but marriage is a state recognition as far as rights are concerned. Religions should have no say in anything other than whether they will accept the marriages in their faith.
I am tired of having to devote so much of my life to having to be an activist to obtain the same rights as other Americans take for granted. I would much rather enjoy my time with Rodolfo, read, take photographs, do my podcast, watch TV, socialize with friends, etc. I have been a gay activist for since coming out 22 years ago. It is exhausting and I have had enough.
This afternoon my son, Nathaniel, told me that I have fought hard for over two decades and that I should let others take my place, that I have done more than my fair share. I told him that I know many people whom have been in this fight for over 50 years whom have done far more than I have.
Unfortunately, I cannot sit back and I cannot stop. If I do that I will be powerless and this effort requires ever hand on deck – every LGBT person, every supporting friend, every family member, every co-worker, every caring person and every voter that supports us. We cannot win this battle alone.
I was devastated today by this horrifying news that blind-sided me and once again made me realize just how vulnerable Rodolfo and I are, how easily any gained ground won can be instantly eroded.
I realized just how easy it is for us to lose rights that we have won and how little those in power really care about us.
Think of how each of you would have felt if you found out that your marriage to your spouse whom you legally married in the U.S. or elsewhere was immediately dissolved and meaningless. At the moment Rodolfo and my marriage isn’t recognized in Texas but we are legally married in Canada and in any country or state in the U.S. that recognizes same-sex marriage. How would you be feeling right now if this happened to you?
I am thankful for my wonderful husband, Rodolfo Arredondo who is the love of my life. I am thankful for my son Nathaniel (the raising of Nathaniel is the greatest achievement in my life; nothing else comes even close). I am thankful for my daughter-in-law Doris who make Nathaniel so very happy and is a world-class mom. We are thankful for our grandson, Cameron, whom I wish we could see far more often. I am thankful for my amazing friends and the many people whom I know that make my life so much richer.
I know people get tired of hearing me in person or reading my emails and articles or hearing my podcast comments about LGBT rights. I get tired of talking and writing about them. I get tired of hearing me. But then I read about the latest teen suicide or another gay kid bullied or kicked out onto the street.

There was another teen suicide reported in today’s Huffington Post by a 19-year old teen filmmaker who filmed a video for the It Gets Better Project just a month ago. Eric James Borges was physically, mentally, emotionally and verbally assaulted on a day-to-day basis throughout his adolescence and young-adulthood. He claimed that his mother performed an exorcism on him in an effort to “cure” her son of his homosexuality before eventually kicking him out.
I hear of kids being beaten up in school and nobody does anything to help them (I have appeared in press conferences with some of these kids and watched them tell their stories with tears streaming down their faces). It isn’t just another research statistic; these are real lives being destroyed. Far too many educators and far too many parents just don’t care and just don’t do something about it until it is too late if at all.
vI hear that 20%- 40% of homeless youth are LGBT kids who have been kicked out of their homes just because they are gay and nobody seems to care. It is estimated that there are between 1.6 million and 2.8 million homeless young people in the United States. Remember, between 20% to 40% of these homeless kids are gay. Estimates of the percent of gay people in the country range between 2% — 10% with 10% probably too high. The largest homeless shelter in the country is the Ali Fornay Center run by Carl Siciliano who is another personal hero of min and was a guest on my John Selig Outspoken podcast. The Ali Fornay Center has beds for 120 LGBT kids and that is the largest such center in the country. Many homeless shelters won’t take in LGBT youth or make it so uncomfortable that the kids won’t stay at many centers because religious fundamentalists run them and they make demands of people staying at their centers that are anti-gay. Carl sites a recent study that kids with deeply religious parents are 400% more likely to be thrown out onto the streets than other kids.
I hear that objecting to hate speech from pulpits throughout the country is interfering with religious freedom when such comments about African Americans, Latinos, Asians, Jews, women, Roman Catholics and others from the same pulpits would not be tolerated. Of course comments against Muslims still seem to be okay (but that is another rant for another time … one that I also feel strongly about). I don’t deserve equal rights if I am not willing to stand up for those of others dealing with hate.
And today I hear that my marriage to Rodolfo, the person who is my life partner, who is always there for me in the good times and the bad, who makes sacrifices for me everyday, who puts up with my sick sense of humor, who watches me make an ass of myself far too often but who still loves me anyway that our marriage no longer exists and that we don’t matter.

I am tired and perhaps I shouldn’t bother with this. The Office is on NBC right now and Project Runway All Stars will be on Lifetime in less than an hour. I am in the middle of a Robin Cooks latest medical thriller and I have another podcast episode waiting to be edited. But I cannot ignore what happened today and each of you is important enough for me to share this with you. If Rodolfo and I and many millions like us stand any chance of living a life with the same rights as other Americans we will not be able to achieve this alone we will need the help of friends and family.

Thanks for being there and thanks for putting up with me. Obviously, I am still hurting. Feel free to share this with others. Rodolfo and I can’t do it alone.

Fangs — March 2, 2012

Wynn Wagner — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 01:11:56 +0000

Dreamspinner Press announced today that my next book — Fangs Over America — will be available on March 2, 2012.

FANGS is book four of the Vamp Camp series. It is a gay romance novel, adult oriented, but it is less explicit than some of my other fiction titles. It is my longest and funniest novel.

Fangs Over America

Blurb
Free sample (excerpt from chapter one)

Brokeback Perry

Wynn Wagner — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 16:28:48 +0000

By Wynn Wagner

Kudos to the Dallas Voice for the best photo caption in a long time: Brokeback Perry.

Tammye Nash is the editor of this Dallas LGBT newspaper. She’s done good with it.

Civil Unions is a half-measure

Wynn Wagner — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 17:24:31 +0000

By Wynn Wagner

Several states now allow what they call civil unions.

I’m happy that my gay brothers and lesbian sisters can approach equality with those born heterosexual. It’s a step, but it isn’t equality.

This isn’t a gay issue. It is a matter of religion.

My church — the Old Catholic Church — teaches that sexual orientation is not a barrier to marriage. Gay men and lesbian women can marry in the Old Catholic Church. Most priests don’t blink an eye or hyperventilate when they’re asked to perform a gay wedding. In fact, one of the oldest marriage rites we have is for two men from what we call the Orthodox Church.

The Roman Catholic Church thinks it differently. Rome’s church was established in the year 1054, regardless of their marketing attempts to claim it is the “original” Christian sect. Rome says that so-called traditional marriage is always between one man and one woman. Balderdash.

The Roman emperor Charlemagne (742–814) is considered one of the great Christian emperors. He led the Rome back when there was one Christian denomination. He was the leader of Rome when the Old Catholic Church was formed in Holland, by the way.

But here’s the thing: Charlemagne had eighteen children over the course of his life with eight of his ten known wives or concubines. He had multiple wives at the same time, and he never apologized for that. He was a Christian with a stronger claim to “traditional marriage” than anything Rome can put forward.

It’s find for a religion to define marriage however they like. If the Romists and Baptists want one-man-one-woman as their prototype, they’ll never get an argument from me. The argument comes when they try to inflict their dogma onto my reality map.

I’m not Roman Catholic. I’m not Baptist. Yet, they try to control my church.

The Bill of Rights in America says that government isn’t supposed to pass laws that restrict the free exercise of religion, but they do pass those laws. They have judges who claim to be reasonable but restrict my religion every day.

What needs to happen is this: the US government needs to get out of the religion business. My church heralds love in a diverse array. Marriage is a glorious gift.

I shouldn’t have a law that promotes rules of some johnny-come-lately churches like the Roman Catholics and the Baptists.

Bravo for civil unions! Now, can y’all stay the heck out of dogma?

Photo is from Diane’s Muse.

I’m a godless heathen, and I approve this ad

Wynn Wagner — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 15:02:34 +0000

Rick Perry is the guy who barely pulled off a C average at Texas A&M University and battles “Ma” Ferguson as the worst governor of Texas. He brags about how stupid he is, and he does this were others can see. The is happy to tell you he hates at least 10% of the population of the state he’s supposed to be leading. The same brain that can’t remember things he’s said, now thinks it’s a dandy idea to run for President of the United States.

The folks at Second City TV think otherwise. They have a spoof of one Rick Perry TV advertisement that’s been running in Iowa. Perry’s ad supposedly stirs up evangelicals to hate LGBTs. Perry thinks nervous natives will somehow translate into votes. I pray that Perry is wrong. Somebody who can’t even pull off a C report card in a fairly simple college program isn’t to be trusted with nuclear bombs.

Second City is hilarious and spot-on:

World AIDS Day

Wynn Wagner — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 18:38:58 +0000

All I want for Christmas
is the cure
and all my friends back.

Mixed up Christmas

Wynn Wagner — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 18:03:04 +0000

Religion Professor:	We need to get back to the original meaning of Christmas.
Me:	Mithras?
Religion Professor:	(hits me)

There was a little confusion reported in the whole concept behind a store window display in China a few years ago. I’m sure they meant well. The store celebrated Christmas by putting Santa Claus on a cross.

It was sooooo close, but really missed the point.

On the other hand, a little chaos can bring a spirit of fun to the holidays. One of my favorite holiday songs is “Christmas in the Ashram.” It was written and performed by Chris Rosser. Tom Prasada-Rao recorded an excellent cover. It’s a wonderful mishmash of ideas, like putting Santa onto a cross.

From the west to the east
They left their homes in search of peace
A transcendental mystic yogi
Took them in, he was kind and holy
California to Bombay

They travelled far to sing and pray
But on the last week of the year
Their songs became a little weird

Chorus:
Singing Om Alleluia — Hare Hare Krishna
In Excelsis Deo — Rama Bolo Rama Bolo
Gloria Gloria — Govinda Gopala
Om Noel — Jay Siya Ram
Christmas in the Ashram

The guru must be out of town
There’s tinsel in Vishnu’s crown
Someone hung a Christmas star
From one of Shiva’s extra arms.

There’s egg nog in the black spice tea
Lotus petals on evergreen
Incense burners green and red
Santa hats on shaven heads

(Repeat Chorus)

They sang Gospels and Upanishads
Psalms and Vedas praising God
Maybe Christ and Krishna are amused
When humans get a little bit confused

(Repeat Chorus)