Amazon vs. authors and publishers…
As much as I find the NY Times “Book Review” worthless to me as both reader and author, the Times published an interesting editorial about Amazon on Sunday, December 5. (It wasn’t in the “Book Review,” of course. Heaven forbid they say anything against Amazon there!) While more verbose than necessary—the Times’s reporters and contributors tend to bloviate in general—that opinion piece laid out the case against Amazon and pointed out how Bezos’s retail behemoth is destroying American publishing, if not the world’s; and how, as it destroys bookstores, it no longer deserves to be called one.
One charge against Amazon in that article describes how I’ve been victimized all too often by the retail giant: Bots have taken over that “online bookstore.” There are no humans in charge, so you can’t find a real person to help you, no matter how hard you try. My most painful experience where an attack of Amazon bots occurred was when they confused the two books in “The Last Humans” series. I could get neither human nor bot to fix that. (Fair warning if you want to purchase both books on Amazon—you’ll need a lot of patience and need to follow the instructions in red on my “Books & Short Stories” web page to do it. You’ll make your life easier by buying them from B&N.) Probably not surprising, but that was the straw that broke this camel’s back: I’ll never put any more new ebooks up for sale on Amazon again!
On December 7, Pearl Harbor Day, Amazon’s AWS dropped more bombs on customers and the retailers who use the site: The servers went down! That affected the Amazon “store,” of course, and all the shoppers buying holiday gifts (as if they needed more glitches in the supply chain!), but it also affected affiliated retailers and Amazon’s streaming video services and other things. When Amazon fails, it’s a big fail, but they don’t give a rat’s ass. It’s just a lumbering great white shark with its bots swimming around it like pilot fish, doing more harm than good as it chomps up everything in its path.
And weren’t you sick and tired of Michael Strahan playing at astronaut, invited by Bezos to participate in the SOB’s PR stunts? This isn’t space travel. At best, this is just a rich boy showing off his expensive toy. At worst, Bezos’s space flights are just distractions to keep the public from thinking about how much damage that behemoth is doing to American commerce.
You might have noticed that links in my little ads at the end of these blog posts as well as links in their text itself go to B&N or some other book retailer, not Amazon. As I stated earlier, my most recent ebooks are not sold on Amazon. I’ll no longer play Bezos’s games. In fact, I believe authors would be a lot happier if they just boycotted Amazon. It’s no longer an author’s friend. I’m now boycotting Amazon as much as possible. That might affect my book sales, but I don’t care. Amazon doesn’t deserve my business!
Here’s another example of Amazon bots’ actions: On my Kindle, they declare this very website isn’t secure! Excuse me, Bezos bots, but it’s an https website! It’s as safe as it can be. The bots also hide several of my book covers that I recently put up on my “Books & Short Stories” web page. Websites do have compatibility problems when viewed from different devices, but this is suspicious because the covers corresponded to those books I don’t sell on Amazon. The bots have made me paranoid.
Many authors, including myself, have also become the Amazon bots’ victims because they delete perfectly valid reviews and allow perfectly nasty ones to be posted from trolls. I also lose reviews of first edition books when I put up a second edition. Everything’s done automatically, but the bots make too many mistakes…and again, there’s no one to whom an author can complain.
Authors get absolutely nothing except maybe a lot of grief for the 30% in royalties Amazon charges self-published authors just to place their books on the website. Sure, 70% realities seems great when traditional publishers only give 15 to 20% (they pay Amazon for the privilege to be on the site too, just like any secondary retailer), but why should Amazon get something for doing nothing? Zilch is what authors and publishers get! The bots might give authors and publishers minimal marketing help if their books develop an audience by themselves, but most books just languish on the site, buried in a morass of books. This forces self-published authors to spend that wonderful 70% of royalties and much more to get noticed at all. (Publishers don’t seem to bother anymore.) There are no book signings, lectures, or discussions like those where an author might participate in at a real bookstore. Amazon has become the book deposit in Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s Shadow of the Wind, a cemetery for lost books.
All this is sad, and sadder still when you realize that Amazon is the most nefarious force in America, no, the entire world, destroying the centuries-long tradition of book reading.
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Enjoy a holiday gift from me! Defanging the Red Dragon, A Brookstone-Castilblanco Holiday Adventure, is now available as a free PDF download—see the “Free Stuff & Contests” web page. The four sleuths—Chen, Castilblanco, Brookstone, and van Coevorden—become embroiled in a spy case occurring in the US and UK at holiday time. You can download your copy and resend it to family and friends, or just tell them to download it as you did. I can’t send all my readers a holiday card, but I can give you a new novel as a holiday gift!
Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
