If you followed my advice and looked at different models of publishing you’ll note I mention a few specific paths. It’s worth noting which path you are following so that you can properly focus your attentions on the sales and marketing side.
Because every single avenue to publishing includes using Amazon at some level, authors ought to be aware of some of the potential pitfalls. Amazon controls a massive amount of the bookselling market—the exact number is open to debate, but it’s at least 50% and possibly as high as 80%. With a system this large, there is certainly potential downsides…
One of the most common ways people find a readership is to write books in a series. If you put that series in the Kindle Unlimited program, you must agree to an exclusive arrangement with your e-book. That means you can’t sell or publish it on any other platform. Any readers who subscribe to Kindle Unlimited can read your book for free. While you don’t get paid for the direct download/purchase, you get paid for every page read out of a sort of community fund. Every month, Amazon issues a statement based on how many total page reads there were across all authors on the platform and in the system versus how much money came into the group fund. Unless you’re one of the hottest authors at that time (they can sometimes get a bigger piece of that fund) you earn a set amount per page read. It’s typically about 40% of one cent per page, sometimes as high as a half a penny. (They also calculate what a page is differently, and a 400 page novel is usually closer to 500 “KU pages.” That translates to about $2.50 as long as somebody reads every page of the book they downloaded for free. This is only slightly less than the estimated $3.15 a book that size would earn you if it was priced at $4.99. For people who writing genres composed mainly of binge readers (basically any romance subgenre, and certain others,) this is an excellent system as the monthly cost of a Kindle Unlimited membership is far lower than purchasing books—especially since many of those “whale readers” read a book per day!
So here’s the caveat. If you’ve invested a ton of time in building a business on Amazon harnessing the KU system and you suddenly get kicked off of Amazon, you can lose your entire income in a single moment. It happens pretty often and you’ll hear about it if you hang out in different groups of authors. Most of those people who lose their access or are kicked off the platform entirely have played fast and loose with Amazon’s rules at some point… But not all of them. With so many books being published every single day, the system does not use humans to do quality control checks. It’s all automated, and nobody really knows what kind of black magic Jeff Bezos has cooked up or how his systems work, (that’s all proprietary information.) But we do know that Amazon uses bots to police itself. A lot of times, those things don’t make the best judgement calls and you can wake up to find your amazingly successful series suddenly gone. It’s not common… It doesn’t happen to one in 100 authors, probably not even one in a thousand, but it does happen, and it is more likely to happen if you’ve solicited reviews, pushed something to another platform while it was still in KU—or even if someone else pirated your books in the past (that’s right, the system will sometimes act aggressive if there has been an infringement linked to your account… even if it was YOU defending your work.)
If you are on the path to writing sequential books that are tightly targeted to market and utilizing a page-reads payout scenario, then you stand the most to lose if you are suddenly de-platformed and kicked off the platform. If you have published in a more “wide” plan (which is what independent authors refer to as being a distribution in non-exclusive terms across multiple systems including BN/Nook, Kobo, iBooks, Google, and more) then you have less to fear, although Amazon’s KDP system has some of the cheapest printing rates around and losing access to that, even temporarily, can cause hiccups.
No matter which way you slice it, losing Amazon as a sales channel can cause a great amount of pain and heartbreak. Try to mitigate potential fallout from a misunderstanding or a rogue Amazon bought (most of the trouble seems related to AI quality control algorithms trying to combat scammers, hackers, thieves and general ne’er-do-wells who are trying to game the system and steal from the money through a variety of illegal means. A lot of us innocent people get caught in the crossfire.)
In the digital landscape of bookselling, this is just one of the potential natural disasters that exists. There are ways to escalate a concern or an inappropriate takedown, but those things take time. Just be aware that no business is safe and you should, as a wise business owner (because that’s what being an author is,) keep tabs on industry trends and happenings I also highly suggest that you join professional organizations that can help in the case of calamity. ALLi, or the Alliance of Independent Authors, does that sort of thing, in addition to providing member discounts for professional services and I’ve always found it a great value.
Inside the Inkwell 