I regret to inform you that the motley gang of linear thinking helots and malfunctioning bots infesting Amazon are at it again.
And now they’ve gotten back around to setting beloved Mil-Sci fi authors Jason Anspach and Nick Cole in their sights.
Nick broke the news on Twitter.
In case you’re just joining us, he’s right. It has in fact happened before.
And last time, Nick and Jason’s books were vanished from Amazon altogether.
Were these instances of interference with two bestselling author’s business random glitches of the Dead Internet? Deliberate enemy action?
Was one a fluke and the other some kind of punishment from our tech overlords?
There’s just no way to know.
And that itself is part of the punishment.
That’s why these people are agreement incapable, like Nick said.
Because sane people can’t have a meeting of the minds with psychos.
Nick and Jason aren’t alone, either.
KDP has been messing with my popular Combat Frame XSeed series.
For some reason, they’re bundling books into series that don’t go together.
These results come up if you search Amazon for “Combat Frame XSeed”:
Which would be fine if you could buy the books through these links. But when you click on them, you get this:
I’ve talked to Amazon about it, and they said they’d fix it. But both CFXS non-bundles are still live – or rather, dead – on their site.
Again, intentional sabotage?
Who knows?
Unless Jeff Bezos does a heel turn and decides to do a Twitter Files style data dump of his own company’s dirty laundry, odds are we never will.
Lucky for them, Nick and Jason have the resources to set up their own parallel sales channel.
You can get their stuff direct here, by the way.
Nick gets it.
He knows that normal people are up against a fanatical Death Cult that want to die, but they want us to go first.
Maybe these Amazon shenanigans were planned. Or they could result from technocrat bugmen letting their glorified calculators run wild to “evolve” on their own (a key feature of Death Cult eschatology).
The specifics don’t matter.
Either way, the managerial class has embraced a new official religion en masse that’s given them a collective psychotic break.
The people who rule us have lost touch with reality.
They think they know magic words that can transmute biology and propitiation rituals that will change the weather.
You know what else it’ clear Nick gets?
For newpub authors, the Amazon era is over.
It’s past time we reduced or eliminated our reliance on Amazon’s broke platform.
What would be nice would be if some dissident billionaires created parallel services that work as well as the converged megacorps’ used to.
But for now. we do have alternatives that are at least slightly more reliable than KDP.
The rest will come later.
So get with Nick, Jason, and me and join the Neopatronage revolution. Pledge my growing Patreon to join live discussions with newpub pros, attend my monthly AMA, and get insider access to new projects before anyone else.
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Break free of the Pop Cult.
Reclaim your dignity.
Have fun while you’re at it.
My most recent Amazon hiccup was with Tolkien’s Faith by Holly Ordway, which they cancelled the day before release. Fortunately, I was able to order it direct from Word on Fire. (I would have done so anyway, but WOF had been showing “Sold Out” until that point … which makes me wonder if Amazon provides their ordering server.)
You might enjoy this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyxjU0vgoS4
That was fun, although I’m tempted to put Ignatius at S tier for longevity and breadth of distribution–they could get good Catholic stuff into the chains when that was hard to do. But thanks; that alerted me to a couple of publishers who have interesting material.
Glad you enjoyed it.
There’s this little book called The Rise of the Machines by Kristen Lamb. I’ve spent the last 10 years wanting to go around hitting creatives on the head with it, because it’s all about building your own platform and controlling your own store, etc. She wisely watched the downfall of MySpace and predicted that all the current platforms would die, too, so it’s best to prepare. I watched all my friends flock to KDP and waved this book at them, but to no avail. And now everybody is seeing these platforms die and panicking, and I want to bonk them on the head with Rise of the Machines. It’s not too late!
I also saw Kris Rusch talking about this same thing. She said that the only problem with moving entirely to your own store is that what happens when your website breaks? If that’s your only sales vector, you’re screwed. So she advocates definitely having your own store, but being on *every other store* as well. You never know where you’ll find readers, especially international ones.
At the rate tech is degrading, authors would be wise to invest in their own woodblock printing presses.
Amazon bringing back the old school yard excuse “The dog ate my homework” but instead, “The dog ate my book series” with how they’re treating your bundle links.
It makes me glad I started pivoting away from Amazon years ago. KDP has been a minority of my income for a while now.
I don’t think anyone actually does things at any of the major tech platforms. They ceded all responsibility to the machines and then realized that the machines don’t work. It’s too late to fix it and they’re all in on the sunk cost fallacy.
You’re right that they ceded all responsibility to the machines. The problem is they also worship the machines, so being by necessity perfect, any result the machines produce must be the right one. Therefore, if anyone has a problem with the machines’ performance, he must be the one with the problem.
I want to say enemy action, but Amazon is basically broken too.
I just some books from them and I noticed the following: on many books, when you click on the search result or whatever you will be sent to a page with many options in terms of Hardcover, Audiobook, etc. What is interesting is that if you go to paperback or mass market paperback, the other option will disappear in about a second. For example, if you’re on the paperback copy, the mass market paperback will vanish. But if you click on the mass market paperback link real quick you will go to that version, only for the paperback link to disappear. This happens consistently across books with both options and can only be due to something breaking or general incompetence.
This stuff happened in addition to the SORRY dog page showing up after following a sale link that worked the second time a tried. So while enemy action seems more likely, incompetence is a real option.
The same glitch was happening with my book pages. Back in the day, I would contact KDP whenever I released a new book and tell them which series to bundle it with. Now they’ve turned those duties over to an algo that matches books by author and title. The trouble is, it’s too stupid to tell the difference between a main title in a series and, say, a companion or ancillary book. So you get these weird bundles and options that lead to dead ends. It’s disgraceful.
When I was looking for comics from small label publishers I would often run into an issue where the Paperback, “Mass Market Paperback” (whatever that means for comics), kindle, etc. all were for different subseries in the same general comic line. Clearly matched by algorithms, but incorrectly, and it made it nearly impossible to find what I wanted if say I got to the right place on a kindle version but wanted a print version.
Another break is with author pages. For some, but not all, authors clicking on an author name will not bring up an author page, but will instead do a “related search.” This is bad enough, but the search usually is horrible too. For example, when you do this with Fred Perry you don’t get any of his books until the 9th entry. A couple of the entries above that have a different “Fred Perry” (and one “Perry Fred”) buried in the coauthors, but the other five don’t seem to have any relationship to the search whatsoever.
Ugh. Redirecting author name links from the corresponding author page to a search was mind-boggling idiocy.
Do you think that it’s a good idea to avoid using Amazon KDP and instead publish wide (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc) through an aggregator like Draft2Digital (which now offers paperbacks in addition to eBooks) or BookVault?
I’ve been hearing a lot of recent horror stories about issues like the one you wrote about here and increasing numbers of people getting their Amazon KDP accounts wrongfully terminated over things like copyright infringement false-positives (among other mistakes on Amazon’s part), while aggregators like Draft2Digital are apparently less “trigger-happy” about such things. Once someone’s KDP account is terminated, Amazon never allows that person to publish on Amazon again, even through an aggregator.
The downsides of aggregators are that one can’t run Amazon ads without using KDP, and they take an extra chunk of profits (10% of the sale price in the case of Draft2Digital). Do you think that those downsides are worth the extra security of not being (as much) at the mercy of Amazon?
Good question. Amazon is just an ancillary income stream at this point, but it remains a necessary evil. So yes, I intend to go wide and would advise other authors to do the same.
What I wouldn’t do is use a third-party service that takes an extra percentage forever. I’ve used other services that automatically publish to other outlets for free.
“Patreon”
“People who hate you”
This is a 90% overlapping Venn Diagram. If you become more of an annoyance, you will be suspended.
It has happened before.
Thanks. Sharing your concern for indie creators’ success really shows you care!
Show everyone *how much* you care by joining my SubScribestar:
https://www.subscribestar.com/brian-niemeier
“I’ve used other services that automatically publish to other outlets for free.”
What are some options that do this? Do any enable publishing physical copies?
Iirc, Kobo did back when I started out. I’ll be looking into more options soon.
Regardless, any monetary cost in publishing can be made up for with time. And manually uploading digital and print books to other services is like 4 hours on a Saturday afternoon vs. 10% forever.