How I feel about Amazon…

I mentioned in my last post that while working on the omnibus edition of Peter the Wolf, Amazon’s search listing had replaced the first book with the four-book collection. I emailed Amazon, and their first response didn’t help. That, however, was my fault for not providing clear enough details about the problem. So I sent back a reply with a better explanation, and the tech said that yes, that’s a problem, and because they had similar titles, the computers thought the books were the same and linked the two editions. He unlinked them, and about 12 hours later, everything was showing up as it should.

It’s things like this that make me feel so very conflicted about Amazon as a vendor. Y’all may not remember this, but a couple years back, I yanked all my books from Amazon because after a big publisher launched a vampire book with the name Blood Relations, my own vampire book of the same name vanished. Amazon said they would investigate, and they never got back to me. At the time, I found someone working in one of Amazon’s warehouses who could still find the book in the system, and it was flagged to be hidden in search. I brought this up to tech support, and they said, “Oh, it’s a glitch. We’ll investigate.” And…no answer. So I left for six months.

Before that, I’d had another flip the vendor cart moment when Amazon blocked GLBT books from search, which was eventually blamed on “some guy in France” who set a flag on all gay books as “adult.” None of my books had been affected, but I thought it would only be a matter of time before one of my books got pulled for one reason or another. Despite the later incident with Blood Relations, this never came to pass. Even my most controversial books were never pulled from Amazon, while Smashwords yanked three of my titles, leading to me dropping them. (To this day, Smashwords will not remove my author profile, even though I requested it several times. So I have a page there that says “Zoe has not yet published any books.” Nice, huh?)

Both times, the reason why I came back to Amazon was the same. They were the only vendor with a built-in audience willing to read my stuff. More than that, Amazon is the only online book store with a built-in free promotion engine for my stuff. When a reader buys a vampire book, Amazon’s computers alter their logs and then when that reader comes back to the site, the main page has a bar of suggestions based on what they’re already reading. So that ad is saying, “Hey, you read this vampire book, so maybe you’ll like this vampire book too.”

Month after month, Amazon’s customers are buying my books in higher numbers than I see on my other vendors. I might get a sale every two months on Kobo, and a sale every three months on Gumroad. But Amazon usually gets me around 10-15 sales a month. When I got a record 45 sales in a month, Amazon made up roughly 95% of those numbers.

This is the mental trap I find myself stuck in whenever I read some new blog post about Amazon, whether it is about their random and ineffective attempts to curb sock-puppet reviews, or their seeming plans at selling used ebooks, or their arbitrary policies that remove certain books because they’re “offensive” while leaving up tons of books featuring rape porn, incest, underage sex, etc. (To be clear, I’m not saying the other books should be removed. I just think that if you’re willing to let some books with offensive material sell, you shouldn’t randomly choose one book and say, “Oh no, this is too much.”) Yes, it bugs me a lot that Amazon is the biggest game in town, and that they dictate terms to everyone from the littlest indie up to the biggest publishers. I don’t think any vendor should have this much power. But…the sales.

I think the main thing that gives Amazon all this power is their customers. Amazon Kindle readers are willing to look at complete unknowns and still buy their stuff if the price is reasonable, and in this way, they’re the most active supporters of indie fiction online. No other market can come close to touching Amazon’s numbers, and I can tell you from experience, Amazon’s customers are loyal to that market. So they won’t go searching other stores if your book isn’t on Amazon. They’ll just look for something else to read.

And then there’s Amazon themselves, who play hopscotch with their tech support quality. One month, I might have an issue easily resolved, and their tech is helpful and friendly, and I have a warm fuzzy feeling from a good customer support experience. Then the next month, I’ll have a problem that gets ignored and everyone I talk to runs around in verbal circles without addressing my complaints.

I’m a Kindle reader even though I don’t have a Kindle. I use my phone to read, or my PC, and that “buy with 1 click” button is really damned convenient. BUT, one of the reasons I started buying Kindle books was that my print orders either took months to arrive, or when they did arrive, the books were warped or outright mangled. When I bought Linger from Amazon, the first copy showed up so damaged and water-logged, the first fifty pages were illegible from ink bleeds. Amazon sent me another copy and told me not to worry about sending back the damaged copy. Well, the tech didn’t tell the computer that, so I got billed for a second copy because I’d never shipped back the first. Eventually we got it all sorted out, but it does tend to discourage me from buying print unless I think it’s a book hubby will read too. (Hubby is a Luddite who hates using ereaders, and who only reluctantly switched to a smartphone this year after I prodded him for three years about his little grey brick breaking down.)

To me, Amazon is the online Wal-Mart. Yes, their policies bug me. Yes, I dislike their growing power and the abuses that come with said power.

But as a customer, I like being able to find what I want and get it delivered 10 seconds later. As a customer, I like when Amazon’s promotion engine says, “Oh, you finished that series? Well here’s another series you might like too.” As a customer, I like the layout of their store, and I think they’ve got the best design of any vendor, hands down.

As an author and publisher, I like KDP making the publishing process less painful. I like seeing a new book pick up sales from people I don’t know, and I love knowing that Amazon isn’t just tucking my shit off in the back corner; they’re actively promoting my stuff to their customers based on their reading habits. Amazon isn’t spam bombing everyone with random books. They’re doing targeted promotions to the people most likely to read me. How can anyone not like that?

It’s a juggling act. They have convenience and numbers on their side, but their size and power often makes them finicky or even belligerent. I’d be remiss in not mentioning how the KDP Select program is forced on authors by way of cutting the royalties to certain markets. Amazon is saying “Okay, you jumped through the flaming pricing hoop to get 70% royalties, but unless we’re your ONLY vendor, you will only make 35% in certain countries.” But while that irritates the piss out of me, I go back to the reminder that no other vendor comes close to their sales. If I shut down my blog bookstore and pulled my titles from Kobo, I’d be missing out on a sale once every few months. Dropping Smashwords meant missing out on 2 sales a month. It’s not the same thing as dropping Amazon and going from monthly sale to nothing at all.

I want to be an ethical anti-corporate artist, and I want to give people options about where they can shop. But like any author, I also want to get my books out in front of readers. No other vendor does that so well as Amazon.

So, in conclusion, Amazon is like that one extremely rude sales manager at your job. Everyone hates him because he’s a jerk, and yet, no one is going to fire him because he brings in the numbers that keep the company going. To wish he would get fired is to wish that your company would fail, so you grin and bear it as best you can. I grin and bear Amazon’s more crass and arbitrary choices because the alternative is selling nothing and being an even bigger unknown than I am now.

Which of course makes me a sell-out. But hey, you go and write a book, and then you put it out on 2-4 vendors. Then when you make 20 sales with Amazon and 0 with the others, you tell me that you could ignore your sales and pull your books from Amazon based on your principles. I really did it, twice even, and it didn’t work out so good for me. Which is why, even if I have problems with my Amazon partnership, I won’t dare leave. I need them far more than they need me.