Many many years ago, when I was fifteen, I participated in a program called Encounters with Canada, that gathered something like 100+ students from across Canada and sent them to Ottawa for a week. One of our early activities to get to know one another involved breaking off into groups with those from our provinces or territories and composing a little…skit, I guess? Presentation? I think we did it on the first day.

There were usually several people from each province, and then only one or two from the territories. And I remember this tall, cute boy with blue hair from the Northwest Territories get up there with his guitar, where he sang a song about NWT.

“It’s cold,” he began. “It’s cold. It’s cold. It’s cold. It’s cold. It’s cold. It’s cold. It’s….COLD.”

Twenty-five years later, I still sing that song when it’s particularly cold, as it was last week. Friday night/Saturday morning, it hit -42C with the windchill (Americans, I’m told that’s also minus forty-something Fahrenheit). We don’t normally get those kinds of temperatures where I’m from, and I not only put on socks but skipped the cotton ankle ones I grudgingly wear sometimes and opted for slipper socks and warm loungewear. But being in an apartment with south-facing windows, it doesn’t get that bad. I’m considering it practice for when I one day retire to the Yukon.

After temperatures plummeted on Christmas Eve, I opted to buy a door blanket, because I could feel the draft coming around the entire door from the hallway, which is probably why this weekend when the temp dropped again, I was mostly pretty toasty in here. I dread my upcoming hydro bill (I’ve got electric heaters) but the blanket should help with that. At least we stayed warm, and I’ve gone on another prepper spree of making detailed plans and window shopping for emergency supplies. It’s about the only thing that calms my anxiety sometimes.

The morning treadmill walk is now a daily thing five days a week, along with full-body stretching and simple strength training. I could happily do a bit more time in the morning with it but it’s a cheaper treadmill and I worry about killing the motor, so I stick to half-hour sessions 2-3 times a day. When the weather improves, I’m looking forward to long walks again (the cold doesn’t bother me, but the potential ice does, considering I walk at night).

I’m doing a final read-through of The Killing Beach before formatting and proofing, and I’m glad I’ve written so many books ahead so I can ensure I’ve woven enough in. Waverly’s POV is more limiting than most others and no matter the angles I look at it from, there are always things that I miss until I’m writing something later. She thinks of things I haven’t, which is great, but she’s so focused that there are things I often need that she hasn’t thought of. If that makes sense; it might not, and I also might sound like a crazy person. (And patrons, tomorrow morning you get another glimpse at her past from before TKB starts!)

I’ve poked a bit at Waverly 5–I’m supposed to be writing Hell Fire but I need to do something a little fun right now, I’m tired–and while I’m fuzzy on working out the main mystery, I know the character beats and where it ends, and I’m looking forward to that.

A week from today Watcher of the Woods is out.

It’s an interesting experience, moving to some standalones, because there seems to be no predicting book to book what kind of readership there’ll be. At least with series, I can expect X retention rate if people are happy and even X retention rate if I piss some off, but standalones is a whole other ballgame. I did some with Pen Name Romance, but as a genre, I found the core readership jumped from book to book even if they weren’t connected, probably because even within a series it was usually one-couple-per-book? I don’t know. I thrive on being able to predict things and prepare–again, it’s how I manage tremendous anxiety–but it’s even harder to do with publishing than it is other areas of life. It’s daunting, and stressful, to be doing so many new things this year with really, really poor preorder numbers, but it’s also been about ten times better for my sanity.

And ultimately sanity is what will keep me going. I guess I’d rather be poor and marginally happier than marginally less poor and much more miserable, although the goal remains of “not poor and moderately content”.

Also six days until Shawn’s birthday! There’ll be a post for the little monster early next week.

Well, the benefit of thousands of people finding the previous post is that it occurred by others sharing it outside my circle rather than my original tweet, so I could mostly ignore the attention this time.

But I did see a few comments and conversations going around that seemed to…I wouldn’t say miss the point, but take away some things that were not said or implied by me at all (I don’t think).

(Also note this is specifically a follow-up to that post. There is specific context here, applicable to a very specific thing. I don’t care that you hate Amazon; I don’t care if you love it. This is about my circumstances, some shit they were doing with my books–and probably others–and the lack of options for writers in my position. If you haven’t read that last post, you don’t have the context, and I ask you to refrain from commenting.)

The Solution (or Lack Thereof)

Physical Bookstores

“I’ll just buy my books from physical bookstores then!”

Oh sweet, summer child.

I am not going to get into the bullshit of the whole returns system here that physical bookstores–even indies–are apart of, but please rest assured that there is a metric ton of bullshit there too that harms writers and their ability to make a living.

I would also point out that the smug “just buy from physical indie bookstores” thing is said by people who a) have an indie bookstore (many places don’t), and b) have no idea how unwelcoming a place those stores are to certain customers. There’s a reason there are entire bookstores devoted to romance books–indie bookstore owners are often jerks to those readers. And if your bookstore owner is racist? A transphobe? Religious? Look, Amazon is a problem, but at least they’ll send you whatever the fuck you pay for.

Also, for those of us doing our print books through KDP, bookstores won’t carry or even order them because they’re printed by Amazon. So if you want to support writers like me and thousands of others who are independently published and trying to do so affordably, so we can put our profits toward things like paying rent, that doesn’t really help. It’s not a reader’s problem if they only shop in bookstores and can’t get my books–it just means they’re not my customer, and I don’t care. But if you are one of my readers, you won’t find any help at your local bookstore, and even if you could, the book return system is a fucking blight on small press and independent authors in the industry. Hands aren’t clean there either.

Other Distributors

As I said in my post, other distributors cost a significant amount of money. Yes, there are organizations you can join that give you some free codes to upload books to Ingram, but membership fees also cost money. If that works for you: great.

But it doesn’t work for everyone. I don’t know how to explain to folks that not everyone publishing has a big chunk of money to pay for things that won’t make it back just to avoid using Amazon lol.

I freelance as a designer and formatter, I worked in publishing, so I know what I’m doing and I can make a professional-looking paperback myself–it’s just a matter of squeezing in the time. I’m happy to do that for the handful of regular readers I have who like paperbacks (or hardcovers). But the moment paperbacks are costing me money out of my pocket, that ceases to be an option for me, including joining a professional writers organization just to get upload codes.

And I am not the only one.

This is why Amazon can do whatever the fuck they want: cutting out the upload fees (and revision fees for files) and making things available at an affordable price through the largest book retailer makes paperback an option for thousands of people like me. This industry, top to bottom, favours those with high-paying day jobs and spousal support, because that gives you the financial freedom to write and pay to self-publish or sit on manuscripts while agents and editors consider them. KDP paperbacks helps level that playing field in some regards but at a tremendous cost, which I was acknowledging in my post.

Distribute Your KDP Books Through Other Channels!

Like B&N? The company that tried to get away with not paying us during the pandemic?

Distributing KDP paperbacks to other channels is possible, but it also involves a big price markup on my books. I’m not passing that cost onto my readers just so one or two people can feel good about avoiding buying print directly on Amazon. I will not make any more money and 90% of those dollars will go to distributors rather than me.

Just Don’t Use Amazon!

As I’m saying over and over in this post, every single company engages in some level of bullshit.

Whether directed at writers or readers, that is not a solution. Because everything is a problem.

I have LSI-printed paperbacks that sat on my shelf with no one touching them for five years and the binding still fell apart and laminate curled off the covers. KDP paperbacks have held up. I’ve also seen no fewer than half a dozen cases, just among my inner circle and when I worked in small press, where LSI-printed books were sent out with the right cover but a totally different book’s interior. Multiple times.

Anyone who decides to shop elsewhere due to Amazon, great, but as I noted in my post, there’s a reason many people are dependent on it. I will not shame any reader for using it–the important thing is that they buy my books, I don’t care where.

I’m a big supporter of Kobo! They treat me well! But they’re still a giant corporation I do not trust. Apple and Google are playing with digital narration now for audiobooks, fucking over human narrators. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, everyone is engaging with some level of fuckery.

The Real Problem

What I’m trying to hammer home here is that despite folks wanting someone to give them a simple ethical solution, there is none.

Every place engages in shenanigans of some kind. Every corporation is a giant consuming beast because we’re in a late-stage capitalist hellscape.

You pick what you can live with while never, ever forgetting that corporations are not your friends and billionaires are never gonna fuck you so stop licking their boots.

Amazon was engaging in shenanigans I couldn’t find anyone else talking about and I was in a position to dig in and investigate (because hi, I’ve had private investigator training, and sleep is for the weak). That’s it. I’m not even mad? I’m mostly just tired.

I Am Not, Actually, Discouraging Anyone

I understand why hearing about these kinds of things is depressing. If you’re a new writer, or still just trying to build an audience, it’s daunting.

The whole point is just to keep your eyes open and, I’ll say it again, remember that corporations are not your friend. Whatever publication path you’re choosing, I think you need to know what to expect, good or bad–it’s the only way to navigate it.

Also, Amazon customer service reps usually don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about and have no real power to fix anything, and if you bring up something I posted about there, they’ll tell you it’s all in your head. And while I do think people immediately jump to the idea that Amazon is a sentient beast deliberately fucking with things a little too quickly, for me it’s much scarier: it’s neutral. Its only focus is keeping people dependent on the system, buying subscriptions, and it doesn’t care how it gets there.

You can’t make an informed decision about where to distribute your books or how to print them if you aren’t aware of the bad stuff along with the good. Please do not be discouraged: just remember that publishing is a business and there are no perfect decisions, just the decisions that work for you.

The only thing I would advise is to keep your ebook eggs in as many baskets as you can handle, and whenever possible, distribute directly through stores rather than use third parties to maximize what you make and ensure you’ve already got accounts set up in case a third-party distributor goes belly-up (it’s happened).

And For Readers…

Seriously, just buy wherever is convenient. All I care is that you pay for my books. Trust that if I have made a book available at a particular outlet, I’m totally cool with you buying it there and greatly appreciate the purchase.

There is a chance, when buying paperbacks, that if you’re getting a drastic discount on something (Season of the Bitch right now is like $3 as opposed to $9.99?) and it’s a KDP paperback, I won’t get paid for it. Or I might get paid much later when Amazon does an audit and realizes they’ve fucked up. No one can tell. If you want something special and signed, you can pay more through my Etsy shop, but Etsy takes a massive chunk of fees as well including from what you pay for shipping so…again, everything is a mess!

Just buy books. And hey, join that other soulless corporation called Patreon.

Long-time blog followers will remember me mentioning several months ago I had to unpublish Yampellec’s Idol completely on Kindle and paperback in the US store to get a pricing issue fixed. I’ve been meaning to talk about this since then, as I figured out a few more details since that time about what the fuck was going on.

This gets a little complicated and some of you might be curious but not know much about it. I’m structuring this with a quick primer, a recap of the problem, what KDP told me, my recourse, a detour to talk about paperback returns, and what I actually figured out on my own (along with what this means).

Primer of Terms

KDP = Kindle Direct Publishing. It’s a self-publishing branch owned by Amazon. It not only covers Kindle (ebooks) but also their paperback and hardcover options.

My ebooks are widely available, which means I put them at every store where I can sell them. My paperbacks and hardcovers are exclusively through Amazon for the simple fact of: it’s free for me to list them. I don’t sell enough (more in a moment) to justify jacking the price up to distribute elsewhere or go through other popular printers that distribute to more stores. If I could not do interior formatting and cover wraps myself, it wouldn’t be worth me offering a print option at all.

POD = print on demand. I don’t really use that term in this post, but it’s relevant if this is all new to you. My books are printed when they’re ordered. There’s no print run of several thousand sitting in warehouses: you order a book, it gets printed, bound, and sent to you.

Printing cost = how much it costs Amazon to print the book. That’s not the minimum price as they still want to make money on it, and then I set the price based on that. (I usually make about $2 – $2.50 per paperback.)

ETA: Also relevant, I buy “author copies” at the printing cost (plus shipping, believe me it does not work out to much more than buying them new). I mention that below. I also bought a couple of retail copies to confirm things. Author copies do not show up on my sales dashboard because I don’t get paid for them; I’m only paid for sales through retail channels.

There is also a lot of secrecy around KDP practices. If you go back through public conversations between writers like myself, you’ll find all kinds of rumours of things reps have supposedly said about their practices. At the end of the day, though, there is very little transparency.

Recap (with Math)

I noticed in September that the paperback price of Yampellec’s Idol was down to $4.66. That struck me as bizarre because this book is nearly five hundred pages and retails for $14.99 USD. The printing price is $6.61. I can’t sell it for that, though–Amazon needs to make a few bucks on it, so of that $14.99 I make $2.38. The difference between the print price and what I make is what Amazon pockets.

What bothered me, though, was that the ebook was priced to match. Normally it’s $5.99; it was priced at $4.66.

I sell so few on Kindle, it didn’t seem like it should be a big deal, right? (I mean…making a couple bucks less does matter to me, that can buy a tin of cat food, but anyway…) But the biggest problem is potential price-matching.

Price-matching is great for readers, I know. I don’t begrudge that–if Kobo is running a sale and you see Amazon has price-matched, go for it. (Trying to get Amazon to restore my retail price later is another issue, but not a reader concern.)

But you can also get locked in a loop. This happened to me back in the Fictionwise days–I don’t know who did it first, but Fictionwise and Nook had River priced at like a dollar or something and neither would restore the price. This went on for months. I sold a bunch of books, but I literally made pennies. So it’s something I’m always braced for, and I’ve had to fight with Amazon many times to restore a price after price-matching.

I do not want to be in a loop like that again. I reached out to Amazon to get my price restored because despite checking everywhere I could not find the ebook listed for that price at any other store.

What KDP Told Me (Part 1)

I dealt with multiple Amazon reps. I was told multiple things.

One said that I would be paid based on my retail price for discounted ebooks.

Another said I would be paid based on the new price.

The one thing they agreed on was something every writer using Amazon knows but that readers might not realize: Amazon can price things however the fuck they want, pay me whatever the fuck they want, and I have absolutely no recourse other than to not publish with them.

People who don’t work in publishing are baffled by this–this is a printer and distributor, nothing more. But Amazon’s focus is on making customers reliant on them for everything. Prime subscriptions, Audible subscriptions, Kindle Unlimited Subscriptions. Selling everything under the sun and taking a loss on shipping just to make people reliant on you for all their shopping. And drastically dropping prices is part of that: the customer is happy. (I am not making a moral argument here either; I’m rural and don’t drive, so I absolutely use Amazon for things I can’t easily get elsewhere. There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, you just do what you can.)

So if you want to set up your lemonade stand at their playground, you have to agree to their rules, which are that they make the rules and they can change them at any time. That playground has the largest share of lemonade stand visitors, so we all feel forced to participate there.

My Recourse

Per that blog post I linked to, you know that I just unpublished the paperback and ebook in the US store for several days.

It can take a week, but that seems to be what resets their system to restore the price.

This did not solve the problem in the first place–how can I prevent this? WTF is going on? But then I had another issue I didn’t realize it was connected until I dug a little deeper.

Not Getting Paid for Paperbacks?

Here’s another issue I encountered around the same time.

A friend bought five paperbacks in August. I saw a couple of the sales in my dashboard but not all of them. Usually this shows right away but after a while I still didn’t see those sales show up.

Once again, Yampellec being dropped so low in price, and because I was curious, I bought two copies for $5 in print (via the retail store) and shipped them to my friend Dina. Those sales never showed up in my dashboard.

So after over a month, I contacted Amazon and said hey, I have verified paperback sales here. WTF.

They had me look at the books product numbers.

Now, referring to things being printed on demand as I mentioned at the start, that means every single copy printed has a product number on the last page along with the date and location when it was printed. I dug out those numbers from Dina’s copies and my other friend’s (and, I noticed weirdly, these numbers were sequential–but we’ll get to that in a second). A couple of the books, but not all, had “RR” stickers on the back, which indicated they were “returns”, and the books showed obvious wear and tear on them, although strangely Amazon is claiming to readers that these books are “new”. These RR numbers were also sequential, so who bought and returned two copies of Yampellec in a row?

What KDP Told Me (Part 2)

I gathered all these product numbers and spoke to an Amazon rep. I briefly got someone higher tier who gave more than cut and paste answers, but when he didn’t reply, I got bumped to someone else with stock answers.

The claim is that all these books are returns that I was already paid for, so they put them back on the shelf and sent them out when ordered again.

This is…very suspect to me because, especially late in a series, the only people buying paperbacks are die-hard fans. If I’ve sold eleven copies total, in the entire lifetime of a book, it is not realistic for me to have four or five (at least) returns. Like wtf.

Two claims here, I’ll note: one was a cut/paste Amazon reply claiming that if an order was cancelled after it was paid for, that would count as a “return” but I’d still be paid. This is odd to me because Amazon famously does not charge your card until they’re ready to ship, and they won’t print if you cancel a pending charge.

The second is that years ago there was a rumour supposedly confirmed by an Amazon rep that when a book was bought, they’d automatically print and pay the author for two, and keep one on the shelf so it always looks like it’s “in stock”. That would explain, theoretically, why these books all have sequential numbers, but it’s still odd that other copies had sold in the meantime yet not a single one of these already printed books were used for the shipments. And also, you’d think my dashboard would then show two sales on the same day, which it does not.

Amazon closed my inquiry while continuing to be shady.

The Shenanigans I Figured Out

So first of all, regarding the ebook pricing: here is what they’re doing.

They’re selling used books as new. Look at that copy: no matter when it was printed or if it went to someone’s home or not, that is a battered copy that should not be sold as new. But they’re selling a used copy as new and dropping the price to used-book prices.

Because they advertise Kindle as being equal to or lower than print prices (look up any of your favourite books on Kindle–on the right there’ll be a slashed out hardcover or paperback price, to suggest you’re getting a “deal” with the Kindle copy), they then use that to justify dropping the ebook price down to their artificially set paperback price for a used/returned copy.

To be clear, there is no one polishing their mustache and cackling over this–it’s just how their pricing algorithms are set up. Because what keeps customers coming back is a perceived “deal”.

But it gets a little more insidious that that.

Because, you see, I ordered paperback copies of Witch Hunt in the fall. Just five, “author copies” at my discount. I keep a couple on hand for direct sales and Etsy.

Right before they were due to arrive, I got a notice that the package was damaged, I was being refunded, and I’d have to reorder. Which I did, but I remembered something else: this happened once before, in 2021 when Yampellec’s Idol came out.

I’d ordered a handful of Yampellec along with a couple of Blood Ties and a couple of Hauntings. The order was split into different boxes and one of those boxes–containing a few copies of Yampellec, Blood Ties, and one of Hauntings–was listed as damaged and refunded to me immediately as they were shipped. Again, these were “author copies” I get at a discount and aren’t paid for.

When did I order them? May 5 2021.

When were they printed? May 15 2021.

When were they shipped? May 16-18 2021.

To confirm this, I ordered a discounted copy of Blood Ties and Hauntings on Amazon and sent them to Dina. She confirmed they also have the same sequential product numbers and the same May 15 print date. I dug out the copies on my shelf and that I haven’t sold yet and compared the product numbers and location/shipping dates on all of these. They’re identical (or sequential in the case of numbers) to these supposedly returned copies I wasn’t getting paid for. Skiptracing these books and looking at all these numbers, my sales dashboard, and other details, and this is what I’ve determined.

So To Recap

Amazon refunded me author copies I’d ordered as the package was “damaged” and then put those books back on the warehouse shelf.

Amazon then listed these books as “new” with used book prices.

Amazon occasionally paid me for these books (I was paid for the Blood Ties copy my friend bought, but not these other books) while didn’t pay me for others. In some cases did someone buy my “damaged” copies, return them, and then Amazon resold them? Maybe! It’s impossible for me to know because unlike in other industries, in publishing you can’t trace all this.

Amazon is using their discounted prices they stuck on the paperbacks from my “damaged” order to justify dropping my ebook prices.

Again, why does this matter? It wasn’t just Yampellec. I had remove Blood Ties from sale because they were selling the paperback for $3 and dropped my $4.99 ebook to that to match. I’ve currently unpublished River because they’ve got both dropped far below retail again.

I sell Livi on Kindle US maybe once a month, twice if I’m lucky. River sells a couple copies maybe twice a year. Blood Ties just a handful. But because I sell well on Kobo, I can’t risk getting stuck in a price-matching loop because of this fuckery.

What Does This Mean for Paperbacks? Or Kindle?

It means I will periodically have to unpublish books for a week or so to get their prices restored.

And since the problem is paperbacks, what it might mean is arranging a Disney-vault kind of situation with paperbacks, where a couple of times a year the vault opens and you can get paperbacks, and then the vault closes again.

I don’t like having to do this kind of thing. I have 2-3 regular paperback readers, and I want to keep this option available for them.

But this is fucked. Completely. And literally the only recourse I have available to me is to just not sell on Amazon. I don’t want to pop over to D2D for paperbacks and expanded distribution and bump my prices up by several dollars just to continue to make my two bucks per book (I investigated, it’s not feasible). I cannot justify the cost of uploading to Ingram Spark ($49 per book; I will not make that back in print sales).

So here we are.

If you’re a writer: this is a thing you have to watch for. If you’re a reader: this the kind of bullshit we have to deal with.

I have no solutions, just to make the best decisions I can for my income. So in the unlikely event you want to read River, try next week, I guess! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Enjoy this? Buy me a coffee.

Quick follow-up here.