I recently mentioned that Amazon + Audible + Kindle pays me the smallest royalties per book; but also that a majority of my sales volume comes from that same combination. Here’s the pie chart illustrating my royalty income mix:
Here’s a problem. There is a movement to boycott Amazon from March 7th to March 14th (including Amazon Alexa, IMDb, Prime Video, Ring, Twitch, Whole Foods and Zappos.) To support this blackout, I should suspend all sales of my books on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible—but I’m conflicted about shutting off sixty percent of book sales revenue for a full week.
I’ve recently asked our financial advisor to sell all holdings in AMZN, which I feel good about. I’ve also held off on shopping for anything at Amazon or Whole Foods or watching Amazon prime.
This is rebuilding habits. Instead of jumping to the easy online marketplace, I spend a little bit of extra time looking for local suppliers or alternative online sources. For a long time, I’ve purchased my electronic components from Adafruit instead of Amazon. I like Adafruit, they record informative videos on new products and maintain essential code libraries to use those integrated circuits. I would feel guilty buying the part from Amazon, then download code from Amazon.
To avoid being a hypocrite, I should shut off sales through those Amazon channels. I set about that task. Here’s what I experienced.
Pausing Kindle
Turning off Kindle sales seems to be pretty easy. I go to kindle direct publishing, look up the book listing, then select “unpublish” for each eBook.
It says I can easily turn sales back on at a future time – I’ll get a chance to confirm that in a week after Amazon blackout is over.
Pausing Audible
Audible is impossible to cancel and restart on anything less than a 30 to 60 day window. This isn’t just Audible being difficult, there are good reasons.
Audible is fed audiobooks from ACX, a website that provides a marketplace for narrators and authors. ACX provides contracts between these authors and narrators and manages the royalty payments from sales of the audio books to narrators and authors according to that contract.
If I, the author, suddenly decide to shut off an audiobook, that would shut off the associated revenue. The narrator might not be okay with that, so Audible confirms this is acceptable to everybody.
In short, without a lot of to-do, I can’t squelch sales via Audible (a division of Amazon) within a 60 day time frame.
Pausing Print through Amazon
Kindle Direct Publishing has an option to unpublish my books, which I’ve done. It’s a menu item, followed by this warning.
We’ll stop printing copies of your paperback to fulfill customer orders. Third parties may still sell copies of your paperback on Amazon. That means your paperback’s detail page will stay live on the website.
So I’m still there, but just not available from Amazon.
How about instead…
I sell books through a lot of other channels and maintain pages with links for each book and each retailer; here’s the link.
Maybe this is a week to explore a different way to buy a book?