Amazon wars…
Like most authors, I have all my books listed on Amazon. The retail giant has never done much for me (besides giving me agita), and I realized years ago that being exclusive on Amazon was a bad business decision. That’s a requirement for various benefits the company offers to authors. Those benefits just aren’t worth it if authors are savvy enough to follow this marketing maxim applied to publishing: An author maximizes her or his sales by using more retailers. In the business world of products to buyers, that’s usually hard to do because shipping costs to retailers have to be figured in. In publishing, that doesn’t apply, especially for ebooks.
Amazon distributes to no other retailers because they think they’re the center of the commercial universe. Authors should realize that this perceived monopoly on Amazon’s part is prejudicial to their interests. They shouldn’t be exclusive on Amazon. Doing so isn’t being a smart author. Even most traditional publishers are savvy enough to realize this (they fight with Amazon about other abuses too).
Like I said, some years ago I got smart—I realized that being exclusive on Amazon was hurting me. My sales numbers have never been great (probably because I can’t afford lavish marketing campaigns—which books should I choose?); yet those meager numbers increased once I added retailers besides Amazon. How did I do this? No one has the time to approach every retailer, so one uses book aggregators who not only publish the ebook but distribute to all those retailers! So far, I have used Smashwords and Draft2Digital, which seem to have what I need as affiliated retailers (iBooks, B&N, Kobo, etc.) and library and lending services (Scribd, Overdrive, Gardners, etc.).
For my self-published works, I’d do away with Amazon completely if it weren’t for a few free conveniences: My author page serves as another website where all my books are listed, and each book has its own book page offering a blurb, cover image, a “peek inside,” details about the book (many not found on my website), and some (but not all) of the reviews. That author page is more unique among book retailers; that Amazon book page not so much, and it offers browsing readers something akin to physical bookstore and library browsing. Imagine my panic when these two conveniences were recently attacked by Amazon.
First, some history. As many of my readers know, there is now a “Last Humans” series: The first book in the series, The Last Humans (see the cover image at the top of this web page), was published by Black Opal Books in 2019; the second book, The Last Humans: A New Dawn, was published by Draft2Digital late in 2020 (the reasons for the delay have appeared in previous blog posts). I continue to promote both books (see the bottom of this page), believing the book is all important, not the publisher. (Really, how many readers choose a book because of its publisher? Maybe I’m naïve, but my browsing and previous experiences with an author’s books give me a good idea about whether the book interests me—I don’t care how it was published!)
How did this all lead to my continued Amazon wars? Here’s an itemized list of my new problems caused by Amazon:
– The second book in the series, The Last Humans: A New Dawn, no longer appears in my Amazon Author Central listing, but it appears on my Amazon author page (the first supposedly controls the second, but this is evidence that it doesn’t).
– The first book in the series, The Last Humans, appears in my Amazon Author Central listing, but it no longer appears on my Amazon author page.
– Reviews for the first book now appear for the second book, i.e. all reviews for the two books have been aggregated together.
– The second book has no print version, but its book page says it does. And when you click on that, the first book comes up, showing both ebook and print versions.
This is complete chaos! Whoever’s responsible (maybe a gang of bots?) have done nothing. I’ve written to customer service many times, and the best response reduces to passing the buck and pointing the finger. Admittedly this is a complex snafu…but I didn’t create it! And with all this going on, I naturally wondered if this website’s links to both books still work—they do!
This whole adventure makes no sense. The problems were probably created by Amazon’s bots—no human could screw things up so badly. (I’ve always thought that the real Jeff Bezos is some body-less form in a cryogenics tank, swimming with the real Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and those Google guys, while the one who attacks authors is a bot.) Whoever’s responsible, Amazon is guilty until proven innocent. So far they’ve done nothing. Apparently they only listen to high-priced lawyers and ignore lowly authors they’ve screwed!
My advice to other authors? Don’t use Amazon exclusively for your books! And, in any case, beware of them–they can make your lives miserable.
My Amazon wars continue. Stay tuned.
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Comments are always welcome!
The Last Humans: A New Dawn. In the first book in this series, Penny Castro survived the bio-warfare apocalypse and created a family. In this sequel, her post-apocalyptic idyll on their citrus ranch in California is interrupted by the US government’s plan to stop another attack…and get some revenge. Penny and husband Alex, along with others, are drafted to carry out the plan—in their case, forced to do so by the government’s kidnapping of their young children. But the enemy has surprises awaiting them when a submarine delivers them to that foreign shore. Available wherever quality ebooks are sold, even on Amazon (but not on Smashwords). And rest assured, the first book is still available, in both ebook and print formats.
Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
