[TfTi] Hints that Indie Authors might abandon Amazon?
Two emails arrived in the past week or so that, in combination, have me rethinking my conviction that indie authors have no realistic choice about listing their books on Amazon. I’m not saying I’ve changed my mind. Not yet, at least.
But let’s dig into some recent occurences and see if they lead you to question your assumptions about Amazon’s stranglehold on the indie publishing marketplace.
Lydia Davis just says NO!
The first hint came in an email from Bookshop.org, with this in the caption:
“Lydia Davis is Taking a Stand Against Amazon”
The email contained a statement from Davis explaining her stand, describing Amazon’s business practices in harsh terms:
“… its poor treatment of employees, its stranglehold on competition, its destruction of small businesses, its violation of the very notion of community.”
She says she stopped buying from Amazon years ago, but as a traditionally published author, her previous books have always been sold there. For her just-released book, Our Strangers, as recounted in a Publishers Weekly article earlier this year:
“Lydia told her agent [Denise Shannon] that she didn’t want her new book to be sold on Amazon … Shannon ‘shopped the book around, but everyone told her it wasn’t possible for them to publish the book and not also sell it on Amazon.'”
In other words, the traditional publishing houses are so dependent on Amazon’s online sales market share that they would not deal with an established, best-selling author who refused to sell her book there.
Davis’s agent persevered, however, (no, she did not call us) and approached Bookshop.org [read my post from a couple of years ago about why I admire Bookshop and moved my bookselling affiliate account there when I learned about their support for local bookstores].
Bookshop founder Andy Hunter told the Davis story this way:
“So Shannon came to us and asked if it could be done. Working with Ingram, Baker & Taylor, and others, we decided we could keep the book off of Amazon, so we decided to publish the book.
“‘Of course, we know we will lose sales from Amazon, but I’m confident Lydia Davis’s fans will have no problem finding her book,’ Hunter said. ‘It will give them a reason to shop at an independent bookstore.'”
And indeed, the email I’ve been discussing contains the graphic in the image atop this post with the bold statement,
“NOT AVAILABLE ON AMAZON.”
If the story ended that way, this might be the beginning of a major movement to break Amazon’s dominance. But alas, while searching for the information above, Google spit out a listing for Davis’s new book on, you guessed it, Amazon!
In a bizarre digital oxymoron, the book description section displayed on Amazon says:
“Only available at independent bookstores and libraries, by request of the author.”
This listing appears to be from a third-party seller based in the UK. While the cover design is different, the title, author, and release date appear consistent and the copyright page indicates that this UK edition has a different publisher (Canongate) from Bookshop Editions.
I guess this also shows that it may not be so easy to escape selling your books on Amazon. We can only hope that the royalties from such sales still find their way back to the author.
Indie Authors: will they take the Red Pill?
The next inbox item I want to share came from author and virtual summit coach Ray Brehm with the subject line, The Amazon Red Pill. After reminding us that in The Matrix, the red pill enabled Neo to see and participate in a complex reality beneath the surface, Brehm argues that Amazon business models, particularly for ebooks and Kindle Unlimited make it difficult for indie authors to earn much from the sales of their books.
His prime example how the Kindle Unlimited program works is from a Vox Day article, entitled How KU Destroyed the Ebook Market. Comparing a sale of a typical ebook, which he estimates would yield a royalty of $3.49 for the author, if the same book is read in full by a Kindle Unlimited subscriber, the author might only get $1.20.
And Brehm further points out that Kindle Unlimited “encourages participants to try out many authors (aka.. not finish your book)” — meaning the ebook author gets even less.
Brehm’s solution? Take the Amazon red pill. He writes:
“For me, that means building my own audience and selling other things too. I am taking it a step further in 2024 and where most of my new works will only be available to my audience on my sites.“
I’ll confess I’m not ready to go that far, or advise anyone else to so either. Yet.
We do advise all our clients to have their own website and use it, along with email and social platforms to build their audience. And the end goal is to create relationships with them, so that they’ll be eagerly awaiting your next book, or speaking appearance, or webinar . . . whatever you’re doing that enables them to connect with you again.
[See why we call this The Taylor Swift Model of Book Marketing, my take in The Indie Advantage and Yvonne’s in What REALLY Happens When You’ve Finished Writing Your Book?)]
Another “Hint” from the legal side
One last item that popped up in my research, the press and the government have begun weighing in on Amazon’s overall business practices, targeting their impact on small businesses. In September, the Federal Trade Commision, joined by 17 State Attorneys General, sued Amazon alleging anti-trust violations from a broad range of Amazon’s practices.
And last week, NPR published a report telling the stories of several individuals whose efforts to grow their businesses on Amazon were thwarted, they say, by Amazon’s tactics, including Amazon directly competing with them by offering the same products cheaper when they began to achieve success.
I bring these up only to make you aware of more kinds of pushback Amazon is getting over its practices. Since they’re not directly about Amazon’s book business, I’ll leave you to decide if you want to read more.
What do you think? Is it time for indie authors and those who support them to rethink our relationship with, perhaps even dependence on, Amazon?
[For some additional perspective and to get an idea why I’m feeling conflicted about all this, jump over to my post about why I chose Amazon’s KDP publishing plarform over Ingram Spark (and others)]
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