I’m not going to pretend I’m doing the right thing overall, but it is the right thing
for me. What I’m talking about is, walking away from Amazon.com.It’s one thing to sell books, but it’s another when you can’t trust, at all, the
distributor handling those sales to keep an accurate count, or to tell you the truth
on what was sold, how many people borrowed your books, and how many pages
were read, which is how us authors are paid when a book is borrowed. By the
page. $00.0046 per page per average.
It is a rather long story, and you can read all about it here.
You don’t have to join the Kindle Boards to read, the forums are public, but to post you
have to join (fake name if you so choose), and it takes a good while of reading to
get the full picture of what me and thousands of authors just like me are facing,
but the story is worth the time.
In order for me to counter this, to effectively take myself out of the picture, to
actually give me a fighting chance with my 16 e-books with the reading public,
and to get paid for all my hard work, I pulled all my books from Amazon.com.
It will take some time to get back up and on with other online vendors, but I can
wait. In the meantime I’m back with Smashwords.com (I can be bought right now,
today, with better prices, there.), who will then distribute me to all the online
stores around the world, including the Apple iBooks store, and Barnes & Noble.
There is another distributor for the Google Play store I’ll be using.
You might want to call it a glitch in Amazon’s reporting system, but I’ve been flat-
lined since I decided to give the (exclusive to and with Amazon) KU 2.0 program
a chance. And, I’m not joking.
Only thing is, I’ve been selling books, I have had borrows, and only discovered
through the thread link above, why I’ve been flat-lined. Oh, to be fair, I did show
some movement when Amazon adjusted things for everybody, and then I flat-lined
again.
That movement, their adjustment, was their mistake. It gave me a glimpse of the
truth.
They proved to me I had sales, and I had page reads, and nothing before or after
their adjustment (for all authors) had shown up on my sales and read reports. I did
get that one page glitch thing associated with Pageflip.
It hard enough to make it as a writer of genre fiction, without wading waist deep in
someone else’s doodoo.
You can still read samples of each book at the Smashwords.com store (links are up
on the books page, too), and soon to come, everywhere else. You can make up your
own mind as to purchase the book and see how the story ends.
In the meantime, I got another book to post, another to finish, more picks to get
up, and changes to make to my links. My online footprint.
I’m disappointed, more than anything else. All I wanted was a fair chance.
I do see authors like me, those with nothing to lose and everything to gain,
following in my footsteps.
It takes time to gain ground, to get your books in front of potential readers, make
no mistake about that, but going wide (again) will be worth it in the long run. I’ll
blog about this again in the near future. What steps I’m taking to introduce myself
to new readers.
