Bezos’ book graveyard

Ever wondered how to remove a book from the reading public’s gaze? Simple. Publish it exclusively on Amazon!

The company’s CEO Jeff Bezos only cares about profit. When he realised he was losing money by paying royalties to each and every author who make their book available only through his company, he put a stop to the time-honoured practice.

From the readers point of view Amazon’s all you can read for X dollars/pounds per month makes sense. The problem is that because of the way it is set up, the author gets next to nothing. Why? Because no copy of the book is actually bought, only ever borrowed and read. All the author receives is less than $0.0003 of a cent per page read!

Even if you are foolish enough to spend money in an attempt to promote your book. If it is only on Amazon, after a few days it will disappear anyway alongside the millions of others in Bezos’ graveyard for books, thanks to one of Amazon’s algorithms, specifically designed to bury your book. Of course something else may account for its disappearance from the top one hundred. It simply may not appeal to the general reader. Even so, the way Amazon’s book division is set up is not conducive to long term book sales, particularly where Indie books are concerned.

You would think that a man whose net worth currently stands at US$116.8 Billion would appreciate how his author’s feel. He doesn’t. All he cares about is increasing his fortune! Since he changed the rules in his favour, is it any wonder that so many people have stopped buying a copy of any book on his lists. Instead they wait until an author realises that sales of their book(s) have ground to a halt and foolishly decide to offer it for free, using KDP’s up to five-day giveaway program, once every ninety days.

Bezos completely destroys the myth that a publisher cares for his authors, and by all accounts he isn’t exactly enamoured with his warehouse staff worldwide either. The UK ones are paid as low as £6.65 per hour.

If anyone reading this still thinks he is a good guy, take a look at his Prime Video streaming system. Currently it’s costing UK residents £7.99 per month. Then on top of that there is the cost of hiring or buying a copy of any of the films on the site. Compare that to Netflix’s £7.49 per month with no additional costs involved.

I rest my case…

😉