Amazon Screws Authors Over AGAIN!

If you haven’t heard yet, fucking Amazon is now allowing people to read your ebooks and then return them for a full refund.

You can read the full article about it here and click on the Change.org link to sign the petition to hopefully get those greedy assholes at Amazon to end this shit.

Is Amazon's ebook return policy ruining authors' careers?

A petition launched on change.org has been made to tackle Amazon's policy of allowing users to return books no matter…

www.euronews.com

I’m actually going as far as pulling my books out of Kindle Select and publishing them on Draft2Digital as well. I’ve been using Kindle Direct Publishing for over five years, so I can’t quite just yank everything off of Amazon, though I would really like to. Eventually, I might though.

In the process of removing my 27 books from Kindle Select today I learned another little thing about those bastards. Apparently, they automatically click the tab so your books get put back into Kindle Select each time after 90 days. You have to go in and manually unclick that shit otherwise your books remain exclusive to Amazon indefinitely.

Draft2Digital recently partnered with Smashwords, so I think their distribution reach (which includes Amazon)is probably pretty formidable now. They also allow you to make paperbacks for free as well now. I think you still have to pay to make audiobooks. That might be the one and only advantage Amazon offers to offers at this point. If you are interested in Draft2Digital you can check them out here. It might be a while before I can dump Amazon completely, but if I end up selling a similar number of books with them as I currently do with fucking Amazon then I most likely will.

https://www.draft2digital.com/

And this isn’t the first time I’ve had problems with Amazon/Kindle. A few years back when I tried to run Amazon ads for my collection of poetry titled Diet of a Piss Poor Poet. Amazon flat out rejected it because I used the word piss in the title. I spent weeks arguing with them about it since “piss poor” is a phrase that has been used in the English language at least since the 19th century. I emailed them dozens of times with literary examples of the phrase having been used by various authors, many of them literary icons.

Amazon refused to budge and I eventually changed the title of the ebook version to “Diet of a Destitute Poet” for the ebook version so I could run Amazon ads (not that they did my any good at all) and left the paperback version with the original title. I learned the hard way that Amazon considers themselves god and they will not listen to authors no matter what their argument is. Except of course if you happen to be famous or the author of a book that is making Amazon a lot of money. Then, all of sudden, the rules don’t apply anymore. During my long battle with Amazon over the title of my collection of poetry I found plenty of other books with profanity in their titles far worse than mine. I’m pretty sure most it not all of these other books were running ad campaigns on Amazon since most of them were best sellers already.

From what I’ve read about how Amazon treats its employees it makes sense that they wouldn’t give a shit about indie authors, who I’m sure to them are looked upon as low grade temp employees.

I haven’t worked with Draft2Digital enough yet to know whether they treat authors better than Amazon does, but I have decided to at the very least yank all of my ebooks off of Amazon and publish them on Draft2Digital instead. Making the paperback versions on Amazon was a lot of work, so for now they will stay where they are, but eventually I will probably move everything off of Amazon. I don’t sell that many books as it is, so why should I let Amazon treat me like shit when there are other options.