Amazon is Trash for Authors, and I Hate Them So Much
"Everything Amazon says is a lie, and everything they have is stolen." - Freidrich Neitzche, if he was trying to get self-published in 2023.
Look, 2011 was a crazy time for me, okay? I published something like four books in a heady rush of excitement on Amazon. All at once. Not well edited, with shitty covers. We know that. Well, I do. I don’t know who you are at all.
It was a mistake, I understand that. Own it. Embrace it. I paved the way so the people who followed later didn’t have to. I even got a decent little book out of it. (Note to self: Make this book free now.) I’ve spent a fair amount of time since then not only correcting my mistakes (you can’t, fully, which is why you need to listen and pay attention and not make the same mistakes) but in trying to prevent at least a few others from doing the same.
But now? My problems in Radar Love are down to the stylistic. And, not to be a dickhead, but even the very first published drafts won over a large majority of readers. My covers are pretty damn slick now. My blurbs and author bios still suck, I guess. That’s neither here nor there. While a great many deficiencies in my back catalog are my own, my greatest problems with Amazon lie in their own sordid practices.
The way they screw the dogshit out of me, my narrators, and all writers and narrators, for instance. As far as I know, they are still running a backdoor audiobook subscription service, giving the full cash value back on any audiobook up to 364 days later. At which time, they TAKE BACK THE ROYALTIES FROM THE WRITER AND NARRATOR.
What kind of cunty bullshit is this? I never signed any agreement to this end. Did I? Show me. I am especially incensed because my poor narrators don’t make shit off of my books anyway. This is a strategy for Amazon, and like many of their strategies, it’s all slanted toward screwing indie authors over.
Now, it probably is my fault that they lock your audiobooks up for seven years, with a rolling reset, unless you shut them down on that. Nevertheless, it’s a very predatory practice. Scummy. But probably detailed somewhere in some terms I didn’t read. And I do know about it.
Forget that you have to know my book’s title AND my name just to be able to find it on Amazon. I mean, hell yes, put some product that has nothing to do with the search string two pages ahead of the book title that matches the search exactly. That’s super ethical. Kind of like those other huge pieces of shit, Google. But anyway. They’ll get their own essay. With screenshots.
Or how they made it insanely easy for anyone to drive by and one-star a book, with no oversight, no recourse. This primarily happens to indies, of course. It’s something that helps mainstream publishers by hurting their competition.
Shitty, trashy, wildly unethical. Even when I had someone ADMIT that they one-starred my book out of spite, having never read it, and provided proof, the slag job reviews still sit there. Just enough, mind you, that I can’t even advertise on Bookbub until I get some more 5-star reviews to overcome it. This is after I provided literal proof and screenshots of the words of the person who did it. (If you must know, a piece of shit Indian book scammer who was unhappy because I called him out publicly.)
Now we come to why I currently hate these cunts more than I ever have before.
I use Amazon Vella as a writing tool. I mean, I did make something like $1000 when they were throwing money at us last year. I suspect that is all a tax dodge, a loss leader strategy. Vella was very poorly implemented and continues to operate that way. It’s not designed to succeed. And it can’t because it raises the cost of an ebook to $30-$40…
Now, I do credit Vella with enabling me to bring Everything Went Black, my first novel that was written specifically as a serial, to a word count approaching 80,000 words, with about 40,000 more to go. But I could have done that without them. But I enjoy the immediacy of writing something in the morning, giving it a half-assed editing pass, and publishing it.
I even had a few people reading daily until I fell way the hell off with my writing. I’m just now back on the case, and I still don’t write a new chapter every day as I had before. But that’s on me.
I also put Penultimate Hustle L.A. on there, because it’s almost complete. No one seems to care about it, for whatever reason, so I haven’t been motivated to finish it yet, especially since it’s a rewrite from scratch of a book I already wrote once. I know how it ends. EWB is extremely satisfying and is also loads beyond the Ultimate Hustle series (so far) in terms of quality writing and story, I feel.
My narrator and I also have an entire Radar Love audiobook that is days away from completion, but neither of us cares too much about it because Amazon is just terrible.
However, my main gripe of late is that Amazon has been sitting on a Vella story of mine for 14 months now.
Fourteen fucking months. They will not publish it. They will not tell me why. In fact, they openly lie to me, every two weeks or so, and say they are looking into this deeply technical issue. Apparently, no one at that entire organization has really mastered their own software. Somehow, my book is a special case, composed of alien symbols or something.
Just completely insulting bullshit, piled to the ceiling. Fucking pathetic. But I’m still kind of locked into Amazon for now. Because of inertia.
Now, I don’t think it’s entirely coincidental that the book they won’t publish is called Boogaloo, and is kind of edgy in a political sense. The sort of book some douchebags don’t want to be published.
In fact, a good author friend of mine revealed a simple truth that I have never considered. Amazon is the force behind a much bigger sort of ‘shadowbanning’ that can occur across platforms, without coordination.
How, you ask, assuming this is crazy talk? Because most social media goes through Amazon Web Services.
It’s that simple. If they decide they don’t want you to have visibility, you will disappear from Amazon searches. From Twitter and Facebook searches. Instagram. Or whatever platforms they host. It’s all black box stuff, and they hold all the cards.
So, fuck my life. If you’ve never published yet, but are considering it, put Amazon at the bottom of your list. Get your stuff everywhere else, first. I could relate some of my friend’s own personal horror story, which goes WAY beyond all this. Their book was making sales that they never got royalties for. Then it was shadowbanned.
Now it’s pulled, and avenues for distribution have been closed. Amazon has rigged the game for her so much that it is no longer financially feasible to publish her book. She invoked lawyers, and in response, she is blocked at the IP level on a regular basis.
A book that is in high demand, in fact. Waiting lists for a used copy extend up to a year. This is so disheartening. I once had optimism as a writer. Now all I see is a gigantic, evil conglomerate working in the shadows to fuck over aspiring new writers. It makes me shoot blood out of my fucking eyes, I hate them so bad.
I do hope Jeff Bezos gets AIDS. Fuck you Amazon. Fuck you in your stupid ass.
Oh, here are my books, by the way. The prices will go up if I ever feel they are good enough for prime time. https://t.co/wvJqHUaryb
Check out Everything Went Black. Some people whose opinions I respect greatly are calling my best book yet. I've already pulled it from Vella, so you have less than two weeks. https://us.amazon.com/kindle-vella/story/B09DYYMSBX (Update: I haven't pulled it from Vella yet. I thought I had.)
Update: Boogaloo is an offensive, prohibited word that has nothing to do with my content. Somehow.
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