About that Amazon letter…
Lots of authors have weighed in on this topic recently, so you might already know that Amazon sent all of us indie authors publishing through KDP an email asking us to write to Hachette and ask them to resolve this pricing dispute. I have to say, I don’t get why Amazon would ask me for my help on this when it’s none of my business. I’m not a Hachette author, and I can’t even recall the last time I bought one of their books. I absolutely do not care what they want to charge for their books.
You know what I do care about? I care about having the freedom to price my books however I want. I have a fan-fic book I’d love to give away for free on Amazon as a sort of loss leader like the big publishers get to do. But Amazon doesn’t let me do that. Kobo will let me give a book away for free. Gumroad will too. But Amazon will only grant me a few days for free as a promotion, and only if I agree to give them exclusive rights to sell my book. I don’t really like that deal, but Amazon is not open to talking to me about pricing because I’m not a big publisher. I’m just a little indie, and Amazon’s able to force me to agree to most of their terms. So, since I don’t want to give them exclusive rights, I don’t get to give books away for free. I don’t get to use Amazon’s shiny new Kindle Unlimited service. In several markets, I only get 35% royalties because I won’t work exclusively with Amazon. I don’t think any of that is fair, but Amazon is where I get most of my sales from, so I have to take whatever terms they give me and grin and bear it.
When it comes to pricing, I’m only allowed to offer what Amazon will allow me. So I can’t sell a book for 49 cents like I used to. If I wanted to sell a book for 99 cents, I’d have to accept a 35% royalty on all sales instead of just a few select markets. So what Amazon is really asking me is, “Please tell Hachette to take the same crap deal we’re giving you.” Uh, and what’s my incentive to do this?
What this is starting to remind me of is a pair of divorcing parents who both want their kids to get in the fight with them. Mommy Amazon doesn’t like that Daddy Hachette still won’t give in to her demands, so now it’s time to bring the kids in and make them repeat her demands. Well with all due respect, no, Mommy Amazon, I’m not going to do your job for you. I was never your favorite kid to begin with, and you’re not exactly doing me any favors with your constant demands that I be exclusively loyal to you. I do wish you and Daddy Hachette would come to some kind of resolution and stop all this useless bickering, because I hear a LOT of people talking about boycotting Amazon, and that could be very bad for me. So please, kiss and make up, or get the divorce over with and stop making your dirty laundry public. You’re just embarrassing yourselves at this point.
