Mike Fook Books – Ebooks | Fiction Thrillers | WTF

There are good things, and there are bad things about writing ebooks for Kindle over at Amazon DTP. At this point I’ve swung back around and I have to say that for a writer covering the topics I am – Thailand nightlife, Thailand girls, Thailand’s strangeness…

AMAZON DTP BLOWS.

I can’t say it any more clearly than that. The good things I mentioned can be summed up by one statement: I make more money in the short-term listing my books there.

Here are the reasons why Amazon’s DTP.Amazon.com for authors blows:

1. You set a price – which Amazon totally ignores, and sets the price at whatever they want. The stupidity of this is compounded greatly when you must agree that selling the book on your own cannot go lower in price than what Amazon sells it for! Can you say Amazon Blows for me please?

2. Though you live overseas and have a publisher that is overseas, you are bound by some weird fucking rule that says they must take out taxes due America for some reason.

3. Authors’ commissions are 70% for books sold ONLINE to US based customers. It drops to 35% for books sold ONLINE to foreign customers. What the F??? Does it cost them more money to send a digital book to Europe? Nope. It’s just another way to bend authors over and hold more of their cash they don’t deserve.

4. Reviews are anonymous. Any fuckmonkey can buy my book – and in truth, many of my ebooks are targeted TO fuckmonkeys that come to Thailand to drink, fuck, smoke and do it again the next day – and write a spineless, off-based, completely fucking wrong review – and kill the sales of my book if they are the first such fuckwit to do so. I’ve a sneaky suspicion that authors of competing Thailand books buy other authors’ books and write junk reviews so they do better. I’m not into the game-playing, but I need the chance to respond to jackasses that leave ridiculous reviews about my books. Since Amazon DTP doesn’t offer that chance – I’ll need to find some way to retort.

5. I know none of my customers. Not the assmonkey that left the scathing comment on one of my books. Not the other 115 that read my books that didn’t bother to say a damn thing about them. I don’t know their name, their email address, where they came from, or if they gave 2 shits about my books. I basically just paid Amazon to distribute my digital book (which they charge me a dollar amount for – per Kilobyte), paid them to take my customer, and paid them to hide the information from me. I paid them to keep the customer for as long as they wish and try to upsell them any damn thing they want. I paid to make Amazon bigger than they already were. The 115 people that bought my books are now Amazon customers – some of them, for life.

What was I thinking as an author?

Amazon blows to the nth.

Pros and cons of using Amazon’s Digital Text Platform (DTP) to sell your ebooks.

Pros

Joining is free. They take care of all payment processing. You need not reside in the USA and can have checks sent to wherever you are in the world. Their market is massive. Even if your book is completely unknown – like most of mine are, you will sell some books. There’s SOMEONE out there looking for a book like yours.

Cons of using Amazon to sell your digital books

The first major con is that you don’t even get to set your own price for your book. They give you the illusion of setting your own price, but then they change it at will. I chose $9.99 for some of my books. They jacked it up to $11.99. What this means is that my books are not as attractive as all the $9.99 books. WTF? The percentage I make is 35%. Not of the actual price of the book though! I make 35% of the price I chose for the book! I make $3.50 per book that sells for $11.99.

WHAT THE F?

Oh wait, I almost forgot the best part… they make you promise in the terms and conditions that you cannot sell your book for LESS THAN WHAT THEY ARE SELLING IT FOR! Ha! So- if you tell them to sell your book at $9.99. They ignore you and sell it at $11.99. YOU CANNOT SELL YOUR BOOK FOR LESS THAN THAT ON YOUR OWN SITE!

The second major con is that Amazon keeps all the buyer data. You sell a book for $3.50 and don’t get any of the data about the buyer. You don’t know what site they came from. You don’t know what else they bought. You don’t know their age, sex, location in the world, nothing. You don’t know their email address. In short you DON’T KNOW JACK about the buyer of your book. You don’t even know – was it bought at Amazon or an Amazon partner site? WTF?

At the beginning of your professional writing career you may choose to list your books at Amazon – like I have. The owner of my books makes a pittance from it – but, it takes just about that much to live in Thailand.