Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Earlier this week, I woke up to an email from my ebook publisher, Draft2Digital, telling me that two of my books had been delisted from the Amazon Kindle Store due to "disappointing customer experiences".
"Um, okay...? They've been selling pretty consistently for several years now. Could you elaborate?" I wondered.
Before I could fashion a response, a second email came through basically confirming there was nothing wrong with the file formatting and the content was within acceptable parameters. However, because D2D wants to keep Amazon happy, they opted to remove all my ebooks from the platform.
Customer support again couldn't provide any details other than the books might have been too short. Which again, they've been on there for years at this point. Maybe there was a TOS change I missed, and could I just remove the shorter stories and keep the longer ones available?
"Nope, we can't piss off the mighty Bezos Machine."
Okay, that wasn't their exact words, but the implication was the same.
Now, Draft2Digital publishes to multiple stores, so surely just removing me from Amazon wouldn't hurt that much, right? Well, take a look at this chart:
Yeeeeeaaaaah... You may as well just kick me off the platform completely at this point.
So now I feel like I'm back to Square One. Obviously, depending on external sales channels comes with its own set of risks, so it appears I'm going to have to sell these on my own.
I do have a backup store on Payhip, so if you would like to purchase any of my books, please check them out there. I am currently looking into setting up a cryptocurrency-based store, and look at blockchain distribution so I never have to deal with this again.
Thank you for reading this little rant. I hope your week is going a lot better.