My Perhaps Unsolicited Opinion on the Amazon vs. Hachette Feud (It's More Complicated Than You Think)

As a self-published author, Amazon has been more or less good to me (we'll get back to the "more or less" in a minute). They've provided me and thousands of others with the ability to publish our work online for the price we want, set us up with a staggering 70% royalty rate*, and have consistently sought to redefine consumer experiences with their Prime shipping policies and streaming media program.

When you go to purchase a book on Amazon, you get a user-friendly experience. There are reviews for you to peruse. If you've got Prime, you get FREE two-day shipping. And if you're not so much into physical books these days, you can download the book onto your kindle in... minutes? Seconds?

And of course, the Kindle itself is a revolutionary device. Even the Kindle Fire models, which feature functions far outside the realm of e-readers, are priced considerably lower than their main competition, Apple's iPad. Amazon is consistently at the forefront of change, which is a good thing.

More or less (told you).

See, everything I've just told you is only the surface of what and who Amazon is. There's a dark side to Amazon, one many people don't or choose not to see, but one that is totally valid and just a little bit scary.

Let's start with their censorship practices.

If you were, say, an erotica author, you might want to look closely at Amazon's content guidelines. Although it's clear they don't accept pornography, there's another section below that called "offensive material." Reading the description reveals a single sentence:

“What we deem offensive is probably about what you would expect. ”

That's about as vague as you can possibly get. And what's worse is that it's constantly changing. There are no rules.

What happens when you violate this content guideline is that your book is either ADULT filtered or is blocked completely from sale. This may happen with or without notification (if it's the former, it's always without) and as of this month, it's bordering on irreversible.

Accounts have been completely shut down over users attempting to change the content they assume is tripping Amazon's filter and resubmitting, a practice that has long been standard when dealing with KDP's reviewers. Notices have been sent by KDP stating that if the user attempts to create another account, that one will be blocked as well. Basically, you can never publish on Amazon again.

Now, you may say, "well, I'm sure if you just e-mail them about your book, you'll find out what they find offensive about it." But this is also not the case.

When one enquires about their filtered or blocked title, they receive a form letter. It looks something like this:

“Reasons your title was filtered: cover/title/description.”

That's it. Nothing more than that. And if you continue to ask, they'll continue giving you the same answer.

It forces authors to play a guessing game. And now when we guess wrong, our ability to publish at all is being threatened.

When the Pornocalypse occurred back in 2013, erotica authors were divided. Some were in an uproar over censorship being a slippery slope, while others insisted it was merely the "outliers" who were being targeted—i.e., anything to do with incest or bestiality. But it's been a year now and we've seen that's not the case. Titles as innocuous as Selena Kitt's "Babysitting the Baumgartners" have been censored because "babysitting" is a word that now triggers their filter. And as of last month, Amazon is now targeting BDSM fiction for filtering and/or removal.

To take it a step further, Amazon applies these restrictions only to authors of self-published titles. So while a self-published author might see their entire BDSM catalog wiped from KDP, E.L. James, author of the obscenely popular Fifty Shades of Grey series, will continue to be front and center on the digital storefront for erotica and even romance (something self-publishers also can't do, by the way, is publish in both romance and erotica—publishing in erotica disallows you from publishing in any other category).

It's only now that authors are becoming uncomfortable with Amazon's policies, and only because it's now slipping its tendrils of censorship into other genres. But if you'd kept up with Amazon's strategies, you might not be so surprised at all.

For instance, in 2011, Amazon ran a promotion that if you went into any of its competitors' stores and used their Price Check app to scan an item, and then bought that item at Amazon.com instead, you'd get a 5% discount. They were actively encouraging their customers to walk into stores, scan their products, and then give their business over to Amazon. While that's certainly not illegal, it's dirty and shady at best.

Then in 2013, Amazon began offering a "deal" to small bookstores right around the time Borders went out of business. They'd allow them to stock Kindles for six percent off of the retail price while earning ten percent of the royalties off of any eBook sales purchased through those devices for up to two years from the date of sale. Indie stores were rightfully outraged by the idea that they'd be approached to sell their competitors' stock, effectively offering their customers a way to put them out of business.

Yes, Amazon is used to fighting dirty. Which is why I'm not so sure I side with them on the Hachette feud.

True, Amazon has opened the door to vastly higher royalties for authors—rates we deserve and currently can't find anywhere else. True, big, traditional publishers like Hachette offer very low rates in comparison and force authors through the tedious, years-long process of publishing their novels (which has its own set of pitfalls that are too numerous to cover here). True, the dispute seems to be over publishers still trying to control the price of eBooks, which they are not suited to do (nor have they ever been). None of this is to say that Hachette is in the right here, either.

But Amazon handled it poorly from the start by listing Hachette authors' books as "two-to-four weeks for delivery" and including a huge banner at the top of their Amazon pages that said, "readers can find books like this for less from these authors." This is the very definition of dirty pool, and while it's not out of character for Amazon or Jeff Bezos, it's startling, to say the least.

It's for these reasons that when extremely popular self-published authors like Hugh Howey (who I respect and admire in all other ways) write what's basically fanfiction about how eternally awesome and benevolent Amazon is, it makes me worry. Amazon has dominated a multitude of markets thus far, and a monopoly is never a good thing, even (especially) when it comes to publishing. As we've seen in the past, they're more than willing to step on freedom of expression and muddy the waters so that authors can no longer even tell what will or will not be blocked, banned, or get their accounts permanently deleted. While we may cheer for Amazon today when it does things like go toe-to-toe with the Big Six or tell France to go pound sand with their ban on free shipping, I wonder how we'll feel if years from now, when we've all sided heavily with Amazon, they bring down the hammer.

In my experience, and in many other authors', it's a distinct possibility. It's one that we've already lived.

So while I appreciate Amazon's ingenuity and the good it's done for self-published authors, I also recognize the bad, the ugly, and the outright appalling. Make no mistake that Amazon still holds the same bias toward self-published material that other publishing houses do. It's just a matter of where they apply that bias first.

And as Laura Miller said in her phenomenal Salon article:

“While there’s not much self-publishers can do to influence the outcome of the Hachette-Amazon dispute, this affair should serve as a cautionary tale about placing too much power in the hands of a single retail outlet. Amazon may seem like your best friend right now, but so it also seemed to traditional publishers when it appeared in the late 1990s, as a counterbalance to chain bookstores.”

This is how frogs boil. And we should all be wary.

* - 70% royalty rate only applies to books priced over $1.99. For everything else, the royalty rate is 35%.