Literature In A Time Of Tariffs

One thing I don’t see a lot of writers and publishers talking about in this day and age are Pussy Grabber’s tariffs and their effect on continuing the never ending destruction of American Literature. So before the Amazon stans and the Karen/Chad combos come on the post name calling and accusing me and those who share their opinion of being sensationalist without doing any due diligence and looking anything up for themselves, let’s get to a few DOCUMENTED facts first as to how literature has gotten caught in the web of madness currently affecting all retail in the United States.

This is a multifaceted issue but I’ll cover all the immediate issues.

Books, if they are classified as informational materials are exempt from the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which is the law Pussy Grabber manipulated to have tariffs in the first place. In theory a book, no matter the genre, should be excluded with no additional costs applied stacked on top of the retail price if you are importing/exporting from America as a homebase.

But there are fucking problems.

Biggest kerfluffle is the paper. Paper is the gold on which the words sit on, and across the board from magazines and newspapers to novels and textbooks, the written word isn’t the written word without it. Now in case you didn’t know, the United States really doesn’t produce jack shit when it comes to print these days. Canada has the market share, producing 80% of paper for publishing (which you can read about in the Columbia Journalism Review here: https://www.cjr.org/analysis/tariffs-canada-newsprint.php). What most don’t know is that Pussy grabber had already put a tariff on groundwood paper (which is used in newsprint/magazine publishing mostly) and said that the Canadian government subsidized and sold paper to the US at below market prices; back then that caused process to hike up 30-35% THEN. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-tariffs-hurting-newspaper-industry/. This tedious and fragile relationship going forward changes daily, so you may very well wake up in the morning and find out books are being added to the tariffs.

Ok, that’s just Canada. What if your distributor is dealing with other countries? Well, you could very well be fucked if they are dealing with China, who definitely has stepped up their game on price and competitiveness in printing. Larger U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods do include books, and a 7.5% tariff remains in place for many printed books imported from China under the Section 301 tariffs from the previous administration on top of the current Chinese tariffs which are so bananas and changing weekly you can just go to Peterson Institute of Economics to keep up with it here: https://www.piie.com/research/piie-charts/2019/us-china-trade-war-tariffs-date-chart. Overall, that means your distributor is going to want more money to put your book out as costs rise for them.

Then there’s the international market. In response to the election of Pussy Grabber and his promises to fuck shit up, the European Union last December implemented new GSRP regulations that pretty much put half of American Etsy out of business. These new EU regulations require that you (which would mean author/publisher) are now considered to be the “manufacturer” or your product, so you have to fill out a sheet and put ALL the contact info of everybody that participated in the creation of the book. We’re not just talking the distributor. They want very specific info, like who made the ink used in the book, who made the glue for binding, who made the paper. You have to have the company names, addresses, and emails. If you can’t do that, you need to have a EU representative that can take care of that, which can be very cost prohibitive. 99.9% of us do not have any of that information. As a result, Amazon, Etsy, and other sites started shutting off sales when this was implemented. Oh, and this also applies to DIGITAL GOODS. So they want the name of the people who made the software you wrote on too. Nobody has that. I took it as tell me you don’t want me to do business in the EU without telling me you don’t want me to do business in the EU. If you want to go down that rabbit hole jump in here: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=uriserv%3AOJ.L_.2023.135.01.0001.01.ENG&toc=OJ%3AL%3A2023%3A135%3ATOC. This also doesn’t take into account any additional VAT taxes and increased customs fees that may be retaliatory based on how Pussy Grabber shits any day of the week.

Then there’s the common sense of just losing a customer base with expendable income. Groceries, gas, rent, telephone, and electricity have skyrocketed from inflation and other factor from the tariffs and Pussy Grabber’s low attention span on racing to the bottom of AI, which is driving up energy costs on everybody but big tech: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/ai-data-centers-soaring-energy-consumption-is-causing-skyrocketing-power-bills-for-households-across-the-us-states-reporting-spikes-in-energy-costs-of-up-to-36-percent. Wholesale prices are going up to the point they are almost retail prices: https://abcnews.go.com/Business/tariffs-blame-40-spike-wholesale-vegetable-prices-experts/story?id=124684249. What this means is, the average reader is not going to splurge their last 10-20 bucks on a book PLUS SHIPPING, which has become a complete shitshow I will discuss at a later date, and with our costs going up we can’t lower our prices either. Fuck what you heard about “media mail” which is as inconsistent as chitterlings on rye crisp being served at the Oscars. Since Pussy grabber took over as interim Post Master after firing his pick Dejoy, it’s been nothing but inflation on top of inflation. Or as it stands, lose lose.

The light at the end of the tunnel, since I know you need one, is that while the tariffs are unsustainable in everyday life, not even PenguinRandomSchuster are sitting pretty in this mess. Most of their books ARE printed outside of the United States, and their previous cushy deals with free shipping and handling are over. Remember when I said China had book tariffs on them? Those are the people making PenguinRandomSchuster books on the low-low and their 1,001 subsidiary imprints are not eating that cost. So they are definitely going to hell in a handbasket, especially since they spent the last ten years signing authors to get their Ips to sell to streaming and Film/Television is pretty much dead. Be prepared for them to clap back with AI authors on this, but that is a separate discussion.

So next time when you see anything about the tariffs, think about how books are being engulfed in that drama and destroyed under its weight, from policies that are going to discourage PRINTING.

You’ve been warned.