Boycotting Amazon?

Photo: AllaSerebrina

Love it or hate it, Amazon, is now part of our lives. Even if we prioritise buying local, we slip into the seductive single click of buying online from the world’s biggest universal supplier.

As part of the popular antipathy to large corporates prevalent in the digiverse at present (for a multitude of motivations), many people are taking a stand, ‘Anywhere but Amazon’ is now a cry.

Absolutely a right of every single consumer. We all make choices on principle as well as on financial grounds.

But… (You knew it was coming.)

The impact on independent/self-published authors has been significant. Not on all, but very many have noticed their sales drop. Before you say “Ah, didums“, I’d like to highlight a few things.

Through its KDP pushing portal Amazon has democratised publishing and opened doors otherwise locked and barred. Until self-publishing arrived, every manuscript had to be submitted to an agent who then submitted it to a potential publisher. The next stage was the Star Chamber of the sales & marketing meeting where decisions were made on a commercial  rather than a literary basis. Next, those S&M teams had to persuade bookshops to put a book on their limited shelf space. At each stage, most books were rejected.

Many books beautifully written, evocative, thrilling, meaningful, heart wrenching and soul-searching fell into oblivion and readers’s choices were limited. Come the digital revolution, the range of books exploded. Admittedly, there’s a lot of dross, as is published through the more traditional route, but as the indie sector has matured, readers now have an everlasting feast of choice at their fingertips.

Amazon makes no charge to authors who upload their books to its platform. It takes its cut, of course. It’s a business. In general, 30% of the price paid by the customer goes to Amazon and 70% to the vendor, i.e. the author who uploaded the book, as long as the author prices their book in a set range (e.g. for the UK market £1.77 -£9.99). If the book is priced between the minimum 77 pence and £1.76 in the UK, then the author receives 35% of the retail price. Other markets have different ranges, and terms.

But the principle is the same: there is no initial financial barrier for any author.

Amazon paved the way for the ‘one upload for the whole world’ idea. My books sell in so many parts of the world that my brain hurts to attempt counting them all. I would never have been able to distribute my books to Texas, Berlin, Sydney, Vancouver, Sao Paolo, Johannesburg and all parts in between without Amazon.

Now, I instinctively dislike monopolies, so from the very beginning, I decided to distribute my ebooks via several big retailers: Kobo, Apple and B&N Nook. Aggregators such as Draft2Digital provide access to many other smaller retailers. Through Ingram Spark, which prints my non-Amazon paperbacks, those paperbacks are distributed through online stores such as Waterstones, Barnes & Noble, Indigo (Canada), Angus & Robertson (Australia) and libraries all over the place.

Publishing my ebooks via other online retailers means my books cannot be accepted into the Kindle Unlimited scheme which, for a monthly subscription, allows readers to download and read as many books within the scheme as they like. Kobo is more generous. You can sell your ebooks anywhere else and still put them in the Kobo Plus subscription scheme equivalent to Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited.

Unfortunately, none of the other retailers matches up anywhere near Amazon for sheer sales numbers and thus revenue. Please don’t ask me to take down my books from the Amazon stores – my writing career would be finished and my book income collapse. My own act of rebellion will take the form of highlighting other sales platforms first before Amazon.

Feeble? Possibly, but many ‘small’ authors, especially indies, just can’t manage to pay the bills without Amazon sales.

If you wish to make your own act of rebellion, by all means choose a retailer other than Amazon for your books. I have a Kobo ereader which I rather like, so that will become my first choice from now on.

Alison Morton is the author of Roma Nova thrillers –  INCEPTIO, CARINA (novella), PERFIDITAS, SUCCESSIO,  AURELIA, NEXUS (novella), INSURRECTIO  and RETALIO,  and ROMA NOVA EXTRA, a collection of short stories.  Audiobooks are available for four of the series. Double Identity, a contemporary conspiracy, starts a new series of thrillers. JULIA PRIMA,  Roma Nova story set in the late 4th century, starts the Foundation stories. The sequel, EXSILIUM, is now out.

Find out more about Roma Nova, its origins, stories and heroines and taste world the latest contemporary thriller Double Identity… Download ‘Welcome to Alison Morton’s Thriller Worlds’, a FREE eBook, as a thank you gift when you sign up to Alison’s monthly email update. As a result, you’ll be among the first to know about news and book progress before everybody else, and take part in giveaways.