Why are my books published (almost) exclusively on Amazon? It’s a good question. I hope this blog post helps explain my position.
I get a lot of flak for having my books on Amazon. And I get it. Amazon’s employment practices suck. Although Amazon seems like a monopoly with 40% of US online retail sales, it only accounts for 10% of total US retail sales, with Walmart and Target eroding its influence.
For all its faults, Amazon has done extremely well supporting independent publishing. I know they’re not the only ones, but their model has been comprehensive and (importantly) hasn’t changed in over a decade, giving authors like me a lot of confidence in the process in the long term.
Along with the likes of Kobo and Nook, Amazon pioneered the concept of ereaders with their Kindle devices back in the 2000s. And to their credit, they’ve stuck with them when devices like the Sony Reader was discontinued after eight years. With a battery life spanning a month or more and screens that can be read in bright sunshine and ebooks prices being a fraction of paperbacks, ereaders provide readers with a low-cost alternative to regular books. That has caused the book market to flourish. A staggering 99% of my sales are ebooks.
Traditional publishing is enticing but offers no answers.
I have two traditionally published novels with Harper Voyager, meaning I’m an established authors in their stable, and yet I’m often snubbed by them. Questions about publishing other novels go unanswered. And it’s not that my emails aren’t being read. I’ll ask four questions in bullet point form and get three answers, with my question about exploring more publishing opportunities being ignored.
And then there’s the issue of pricing. Like daffodils flowering in spring, I’m perennially asking for the price of my books to be lowered. The ebook has been priced ABOVE the hardback in the US. Here in Australia, the ebook price is an eyewatering $32 dollars—FOR A F%$KING EBOOK!
With draconian pricing like this, nobody makes any money off my traditionally published novels. Not them. Not me. It’s really dumb.
Needless to say, I’m frustrated with traditional publishing and don’t see a future with them.
Let’s be honest here. I’m an obscure author. Reaching new readers is insanely difficult. I have diversified across other platforms, with two of my best novels (Galactic Exploration and Welcome to the Occupied States of America) being available on Google Play, Apple iBooks, Kobo, Nook, etc, but I still sell more of these books on Amazon than all the others combined. To be brutally honest, I earn next to nothing from those other outlets.
It’s depressing, but I keep those two books on those other platforms so at least some of my books are outside of the Amazon ecosphere.
And it’s not just me. If you look at survey results from across the publishing industry, they tell the same story.
Also, Amazon has a program called Kindle Unlimited. It’s Spotify-for-books. Basically, readers pay a single amount each year, and then they can read anything in the Kindle Unlimited library at no additional cost. They can read as much as they like. That has been a game-changer for me. That’s where I am discovered, as readers can pick up one of my novels on a whim and without worrying about buying a dud. Then they can go on and read all 30 novels in the First Contact series without paying a cent more.
How do I get paid? Per page read. In practice, this works out at about 1/3 of what I would make from an ebook sale, but I get so many page reads that Kindle Unlimited makes up 70% of my income. The only catch is for a book to be in Kindle Unlimited, it must be exclusive to Amazon.
So there you have it… if I go wide across all distributors, I earn peanuts. Traditional publishers ignore me. Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited gives me a lifeline.
It is fair to say that without Kindle Unlimited, I wouldn’t have written a fraction of the books I have as it has provided a revenue stream that keeps me afloat. Book piracy is rampant and my book sales have fallen over the past 18 months even though I’m writing my best work, but Kindle Unlimited allows me to continue as a fulltime author (for now).
I hope that explains why my novels are exclusive to Amazon. TL;DR — without Amazon they wouldn’t exist.
I know there are a whole host of reasons why people might want to boycott Amazon and American companies, and if that’s your decision, I respect that, but please realize there are a lot of small bit-players like me that get caught in the crossfire.
