Cutting Ties With Amazon

I started the new year by removing my ebooks, and later, my paperbacks from the site. This wasn't a spur of the moment thing for me; I've been thinking about jumping ship for a few years now, but was wary of cutting off that income stream. I don't make a lot of money from my books, but I was making around $200-400 a year on Amazon, and maybe $100-200 elsewhere.

Until last year, where my sales took a steep nosedive on Amazon (made less than $100), but actually improved on other sites, like Itch, Kobo, and even my own shop. So while Amazon is still the main player in the book world, there are readers jumping ship and branching out to less arrogant stores. Stores like Kobo, who has a program similar to KU that doesn't demand exclusivity from authors.

I bought a Kobo a few years ago, when I stopped buying ebooks from Amazon and retired my Paperwhite. No ads, btw. I don't have to see a random book on my screen when I open it, nor is there a page of books unrelated to my library cluttering my feed. It's nice.

But this a post about Amazon, not Kobo. And I've had so many gripes about Amazon, a lot of it recent, but there's been issues with them for years now.

I'm gonna start "small" with how Amazon likes to screw over authors with sales, while pocketing the difference. I sold a book last year, in what showed to be the US. This is a book that should've gotten 70% royalties for, but only got 35%, so I was missing like, $1.70. For a new release I'm supposed to get $3.45 for.

I had to reach out to support to figure out what was going on, and got bounced three or four times until I reached a supervisor. Only to find out that while the purchase was made on the .com site, the reader was actually in Peru, which has different rates. And then she kept redirecting me to the royalties page, claiming all the info was there, different countries have lower rates, yada yada.

But that still doesn't explain why I, the author, have to get screwed over. I don't care that the reader was in a different country. They used the .com site, and I can only assume they thought I'd be getting fully compensated regardless. But no, Amazon really wanted that little bit of money for themselves. And I don't care if this sounds petty, but I'm annoyed over this blatant theft. I'm sure they do much worse and have stolen from me in the past.

I will say this, though: those days when Kindle Vella was alive and well were the best days of my writing life. They were throwing money at us by the bucket. I was making almost $800 a month in that last year. But Amazon wants to pinch pennies now? Well, why doesn't Amazon, one of, if not THE richest company in the world, be more careful with their spending?

I say, as they drown themselves in AI bullshit. Which brings me to the heart of the issue: Amazon inserting a Sparks Notes type chatbot into the Kindle app. Only for ios right now, but they really want to jam it into Kindles next, because they really think readers are ignorant and hate reading (lmao). Some users will like it, I'm sure. But most readers I've seen don't want more garbage gumming up their Kindles. They want to read and think for themselves. Nevermind the fact that the so-called AI hallucinates all the time, and can't pick up nuance. It doesn't understand the author's intent because it can't fucking think. It's a fucking overhyped chatbot that is hastening climate change and sapping water from living, breathing communities.

Now I'm getting really annoyed. In hindsight, I should've led with a less frustrating point, such as the hit or miss way they're handling DRM. One, I was glad to see they were allowing downloads again. I already sell my books DRM free. But I wasn't thrilled to see PDFs were automatically included in this new switch. I don't consent to that, and don't have that option enabled elsewhere.

Could I have stayed, with DRM enabled? Sure. I considered that. But I decided it would be better to just take everything down, as I know that the people who care most about DRM free books only turn to Amazon for exclusives, and long abandoned Amazon (or never used them to begin with). For new readers...please use a different site. Or buy directly from me, where my books are all DRM free and yours forever.

I'm still waiting on Bookshop.org to pool some of their stock from other sources (like Draft2Digital) so my ebooks show up there, too. Bookshop supports local shops. It's great!

Seriously, there's better places than Amazon, especially if the bulk of your sales don't come from them. I just wish I'd made that jump sooner, but I clung to it partly because some of the promo sites I frequent only use Amazon links. They want that affiliate money, and I can't fault them for that. I just don't want that trend to continue in the age of alternative platforms and direct sales.