Dancin’ with the Devil

Man, I hate Amazon.

Deep down in my heart I truly do.

But, it’s 2025 and we’re all stuck with that bald bastard.

I can BUY stuff elsewhere and I often do but I’m still a Prime Member (you may be too).

If you’re an author you must be on Amazon. Because it’s THAT huge. You must be there!

Case in point:

My little campaign for “Heart”. Well, I’ve been dealing with another of those scammers, this one is after “Women of War”, and swears he left a review but it’s in ‘pause’. That forced me to go over to “Women of War” on Amazon, see there’s nothing wrong with the page. I checked into KDP and everything’s copasetic there. I told him it had nothing to do with me, sorry, can’t help you.

I went to Indeed.com to look for a job because I still need one of those. Found something kinda cool, something I would be good at, something in the indie publishing industry….sounds good, hey? But it’s out my commute distance. It’s advertised as a ‘hybrid’ position. I thought; what the hell?

Honestly, I’m never sure just how anything works anymore so while I was filling out their variety of questions I didn’t know if Indeed would let me put a link in those boxes so I didn’t. I used a Cover Letter file for that. While I was going through my links, of course, one of them has to be for Amazon. I went to my author page, not the one YOU get to see, no you can’t see that in this format so nice and neat for the most part. I can see it because I have The Secret Link which I try hard to give out as often as possible.

Ok. I opened the page. Here’s what I saw.

I went; Excuse me?

1-I did lower the price to $0.99 for the sale period.
2-There is NOTHING on KDP that says that price (or any other) will automatically kick my books into Kindle Unlimited. A certain price used to force authors into the Kindle Lending Library (you could NOT get out of it! Indentured servitude! Bezos was sued…we were free.)
3-What happens to them on Saturday morning when I up the price?
3A-Thankfully we won’t have to find out because no Unlimited users went for the campaign. Phew.
4-Check out the “regular price”. Or, you know, what Amazon is trying to make you THINK is the “regular price” for the EBOOK!

Damn! Ain’t you gettin’ a deal! Look at you, FREE with Unlimited and just $0.99 without it and it’s “regularly” $22.50!

That’s the paperback prices, BTW.

Whodafug is gonna pay $22.50 for an ebook?

They hardly fork over $.99.

Author, Reader, Consumer…be careful when it comes to El Jefe. Watch your step. You might regret it otherwise.