Tag: Amazon

Ignored another Amazon KDP survey

Lynn

Once I realized how unresponsive Amazon is to the surveys they send out, it was easy to start ignoring their survey emails. It’s also easy to see how much it isn’t about being helpful to authors and publishers on their platform and is about collecting information about their competition. And gaining leverage over the authors who use their platform to publish their books.

This latest survey purported to be a survey to improve their print publishing, but the first batch of questions were clearly focused on gathering as much information about the competition as possible.

Many people will give away their valuable business data and think nothing of it. I decided a while back it was better to send feedback in an email and ignore these surveys completely.

Naughty naughty Amazon. :D

Boy am I glad I’m not exclusive to Amazon (one more reason to be happy wide)

Lynn

Ah, I got fired up tonight and wrote a post for my personal site about Amazon and their shitty ways of mistreating people. If you’re bored, go read it. If you want to share in the hate, leave a comment. :-)

The incident left me deeply unsettled as an author who depends on KDP for a significant chunk of author earnings.

Although I’ve been wide with my books from the beginning and intended to stay that way, this made me even more so determined to stay away from exclusivity with anyone, but especially with Amazon. They just can’t be trusted. Whether it is incompetence, willful ignorance, or deliberate shady dealings by the employees in charge, there’s just no way to know. But I won’t risk it.

I finally started a Patreon and opened a Ko-fi account. I’ve been looking at some other alternative publishing paths, too. Specifically for a Kindle Vella story I started last year. I had put off branching out with it, even though they had to cave on their terms to allow authors to put their stories up with other paying markets, or risk no one being willing to give it a shot. I’m going to make sure I get that taken care of this month.

Amazon doesn’t deserve my exclusivity, anywhere, even for a little side project I only started to get me writing regularly again.

At the time the incident happened, I wasn’t in the mood to write about it. Then I was supposed to work on something tonight and my inner procrastinator came out. I started looking around for things to do, got reminded of how badly Amazon had pissed me off, and I wrote a post. :D And then a bit of another one here.

TL;DR, Amazon sucks can’t be trusted.

My turn to move paperbacks from CreateSpace to KDP

Lynn

CreateSpace has been rolling out the migration from CreateSpace to KDP Print since sometime last week. I finally got the popup notice (although no email notifications) that I should consider moving my books.

I didn’t delay, just went ahead and clicked the “Get Started” button, because—

  1. I don’t sell oodles of paperbacks anyway, so if it messed something up I’m not losing much.
  2. I’ve heard that once the popup goes away, it’s gone for a long time.
  3. I’m impatient and I wanted it over and done with.

The migration actually seems to have gone off without a hitch. On the other hand, I haven’t examined any of the books in detail since moving them from CreateSpace to KDP.

I had to link two drafts to the ebooks, but all the other paperback books linked up on their own, matching to the correct ebooks without any trouble.

We’ll see later today or tomorrow if it actually went well, when I log in and check out the details.

I’m hesitant to do anything that’ll require me to approve a book at the moment, because if it leads me to needing to make cover or interior file adjustments, I’m not ready. I’m trying really hard to get this next book finished and don’t want to split my focus if I don’t absolutely have to.

Amazon has a help article up about the switch, and David Gaughran posted about the closing on his blog. And of course, it’s a big topic on Kboards.

Just an FYI, if you haven’t been paying attention, Kboards is under new ownership. I’m still considering how I feel about that and might use this as the push I need to cut Kboards out of my daily routine. I just need to find a replacement so I don’t feel especially cut off from news about big happenings in the SP world. Suggestions are welcome (but I don’t—and won’t—do Facebook). :D

(Facebook has rules about pseudonyms. I use pseudonyms for pretty much all my online activities. Furthermore, I have a unique name that makes it ridiculously easy to track my online activity when I don’t use a pseudonym, I hate being followed around online by Facebook, and I care about following the rules when it’s not something that’s going to hurt me. Enough said.) :-)

Kindle Unlimited: a pirate’s treasure

Lynn

Here’s a screenshot of a post on a forum. Maybe you can guess the forum, but I’m going to do the sane thing here and not mention it by name, because I’m not interested in sending goons after the bad guys and becoming a bad guy myself.

But ain’t that grand?

Personally, it’s just one of many reasons I stay far, far away from Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program.*

(Also known as: Customers ripping off authors by downloading loads of books while signed up to a three-month trial of KU costing 99¢, stripping DRM from those books, reading those books in a way that won’t register for the author’s benefit (AKA authors not getting paid for pages read, because Amazon can’t stop this or account for it because payment is based on page reads instead of something reliably easy to track like, you know, borrows…), and then keeping those books indefinitely after canceling the KU membership.)

Pirating happens, and so does stealing, if one defines this kind of thing as theft. (I do, and although there are technicalities about why this might not be actual theft, I don’t care. Thievery is as good a name for it as any as far as I’m concerned.) There’s not much an author can do about this that won’t cost more in time and effort than is lost to the pirating (and theft), so I don’t worry about it much. Just nothing to be done.

Amazon has proven they’re unwilling to do anything. They switched from a system that worked around this kind of thievery to make sure authors got paid at least for the download to a system that pays literally as little as possible and makes authors eat any losses because of badly behaving Amazon customers.

In all honesty, I probably wouldn’t let this stop me from participating in KU if there were other benefits that I was interested in, but there aren’t, so I don’t. It’s an ugly system, and I choose to stay as far away from it as I can.

As for the pirating and thievery, well, people are either willing to pay or they aren’t. The money gets too slim, they’ll have to read someone else’s books because I won’t be writing, so tough on them if they really liked what they stole. And if they didn’t like it, well, too bad so sad for them. That’s a sweet revenge of a different sort. Reading that stolen book wasted their time, and that’s something they ain’t never getting back. :D

*I did have one book in KU way back when. I won’t bore you with details here but there’s a link if you want to know more.

Amazon.co.uk is having a sale on print books that’s causing KDP to price match my ebook

Lynn

I don’t know exactly what’s going on this morning with Amazon.co.uk and KDP, but I came across an odd value in my sales report from KDP for one of my books. I double checked the book on Amazon.co.uk, where the odd “royalty” came from, and realized Amazon.co.uk is price matching one of my books. The problem is, there’s no lower price anywhere for that ebook.

After a few clicks around the page, I found what I think is the root issue.

Amazon.co.uk appears to be having a sale on the paperback for this book, offering it at a significant discount—but only with orders of at least £10.00 of books.

Screenshot from the Amazon.co.uk web page for one of my books. Notice the price? Yeah, that’s a price match to the paperback.

Yay for them for having a sale.

Not so much yay for me.

I’m the one taking the hit on royalties earned for every sale of this book well in excess of what I’d make up for in volume because of the lower price, for a price match that isn’t even a real price match, because (1) they’re matching a paperback price and (2) the only way to get the low price is to buy £10.00 worth of books.

I have to say, I become less enamored by Amazon every year. Of course, I was part of the Amazon affiliate program well before I started publishing my books through KDP, so I never had a lot of the warm fuzzies for them as a business associate to begin with.

Still, every little blow just hardens my heart against them that much more.

Because this? Is not cool.