My Amazon Free Month - Day 9 & 10 - Why I'm Doing This

So, something I forgot to mention in the past couple of blog posts -

On Sunday I was spending time with my family when somehow the topic of Amazon came up. My aunt and uncle were trying to convince my grandparents to use it, as they're now having more trouble getting around, especially to the store and things. They extolled it's many virtues - from the convenience, to the amount of things available on the site, to the Amazon credit card and the 3% back on Amazon purchases.

And a little part of me hurt inside, because my grandparents need that convenience. They need the kind of help that Amazon can provide. They need the ease of being able to go to just one website and getting everything they need and having all their information - from their address to their credit card - saved so that they don't have to enter anything new in. Technology is hard for them. They've resisted it for a long time and now that they're no longer in a position to be able to just get in the car and go to the store, having to learn new technology to replace that is even harder.

But does it have to be from Amazon? or Walmart?

Unfortunately, right now the answer is yes. And that's the problem. Because these big stores have all sorts of issues, from how they treat their workers to how they treat the people providing their products.

People have been asking me if John Oliver's piece is why I decided to do the Amazon-free month. It's actually not, but it certainly underlines the issues. I'd heard that the situations in warehouses were bad, thanks to other videos that were circulating on Facebook long before John Oliver's piece.

But more than that, the number of issues that authors have on Amazon made it unappealing to buy books on there - especially for someone who is an author on there. I'm what's considered a 'wide' author - the vast majority of my books are not in Kindle Unlimited. Could I be making a killing if all my books were in KU? Probably. But then they'd only be available on Amazon.

Last year one of my friends had her entire Amazon account disbanded - she was a victim of click farms. There are scammers who game the KU system by using click farms to up their page reads in KU, but the click farms also target innocent authors in order to make themselves seem more legit. They can also be weaponized, used to target authors that someone wants to get rid of. Up until last year, when readers became very vocal on social media over the many KU scams that were being run (from book stuffing to giveaways that violated Amazon's Terms of Service, to the click farms), Amazon did absolutely nothing to try and control the scammers. And then when they did, they swept up innocent authors right alongside the scammers - and gave them no way to prove their innocence. This is called "prawning".

It took weeks for my friend to get her account back - weeks in which she wasn't earning any money - and then even after they returned the account to her, they confiscated some of the earning of previous months. Presumably these were the 'click farm' earnings, but since they kept her mostly in the dark about what was going on (she still doesn't know how they decided to restore her account).

Now, it's great that Amazon is finally cracking down on scammers, but it took them a while to get there. And obviously the way they run KU and the way they run the all-stars program means that people are gonna keep trying to find ways to scam. Amazon also does not get ALL the scammers. There are constantly books stuffed or in the wrong categories, etc. etc. etc.

If you want to read more about how KU authors are struggling against scammers you can check out these posts:

David Gaughran has been a long time critic of KU / the scams
Geekwire did a great piece on it
How Kindle Unlimited is - in the long run - bad for authors AND readers

Pretty much every author I know has some horror story about dealing with Amazon. They really don't care about the authors. I had issues with them a couple years ago because someone ELSE was also using the Dark Angel pen name, the same one I'd been using for 6 years, but when I tried to upload a new book using it, I was told it was too similar to their pen name. Even though they'd only started using it the year before. It took WEEKS of back and forth emails until I finally went onto Facebook and Twitter and tagged them in posts before they finally fixed the issue... not that they contacted me about it. The new book just suddenly uploaded and was approved.

Since then I've ended up changing the pen name so as not to run into the same issue again, but the point is that there was no way the other Dark Angel should have been able to upload ANY books using that name - and Amazon sure as heck shouldn't have stopped ME from being able to upload books using it!

Now I'm finding out how easy it is to get books onto my Kindle from Smashwords. Sure it's an extra step or two, but it means I don't need a new ereader (so I can return the Kobo, although I'm going to hold off on doing that for now, because there might be more experiments that require a non-Kindle) and it means I can keep buying ebooks not on Amazon. Because right now, Amazon has no reason to change how it treats authors or scammers or readers trying to leave reviews. They are the book giant and they know it, they keep making the money, they have no reason to change.

Considering my considerable Amazon habit, I'm part of that system of feedback that tells them they don't NEED to change. Because I bought my year long Kindle Unlimited subscription, I pay for Prime, and I buy all sorts of non-KU books from them. I've complained about them before, but I was still giving them my money. It was just so easy. So convenient.

But an extra couple of steps is a small price to pay when Smashwords is having a massive sale and I can hold to my Amazon-Free month.