Amazon Falling Into Legacy Publishing Mindset
I am caught in a frustrating war between Google and Amazon.
I’ve previously written about the indie author’s love/late relationship with Amazon (Amazon’s Indie Author Cracks Begin To Show, Grow) but have struggled over the past few months to make the relationship work.
But over those months, Amazon has steadily slipped into the same sort of pseudo-God-like behavior that afflicts legacy publishing: totalitarian, inflexible and completely biased in favor of teacher’s pets — those they have annointed for publicity and extra attention at the expense of everyone else.
That latter shows a quick slide into the same mistakes that has brought legacy publishing to the brink of extinction: The mindset that you publish everything, throw as much at the wall as you can to see what sticks, but then find some favorite sons and daughters to lavish affection on and let everybody else just suck on an egg.
That attitude also shows in the total inflexibility Amazon shows for those left to wander in the wilderness. In my last piece on Amazon, I wrote about the mixed blessing of the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) Select program. Books enrolled in that program can be offered for free (5 days only in a 3-month period) and are eligible for payment when ever a book is loaned by a Kindle owner to another Kindle owner.
To participate in KDP select, the book cannot be for sale anywhere else. That’s an easy task everywhere but for books on Google Play. Google makes it all but impossible to remove books from sale.
And if Amazon’s e-Nazi-Bot finds the book anywhere, it starts a series of emails and eventually gets the book removed from the Select program.
Now, if I were trying to game the system, violate Amazon’s rules, I’d continue have the book for sale at B&N, Apple’s iBookstore, Smashwords and other ebook sites.
I’ve never made a penny from Google Books while I have made modest amounts from Smashwords and the iBookstore. This means that pulling the books down there represent a gamble that Amazon revenues will more than make up for those losses.
For that reason, I’ve been willing to continue with that running gamble. Until now.
Borrows have dropped. e-Naz-Bot hassles have gone up and I have removed all of my books from the KDP Select program. All because Amazon kept hassling me over something I could not control.
Perhaps the market is changing now. Others in the ebook arena may be learning that they can fight back by providing competition to Amazon which seems to be slipping into the complacency that eventually afflicted the world of dead-tree publishing.
This week, I cashed a Smashwords check. That made me take another look at things.
I’ve just re-published everything, everywhere. So, we’ll see.
