For many of you, you know that I am not the biggest fan of Amazon and their recent moves.  If you haven’t seen, Amazon has been quick to remove well earned reviews, but won’t budge in removing reviews that are clearly in appropriate.

One example for me personally was when someone had actually commented in their review that they hadn’t read the book, but didn’t like the cover so they gave it a 1 star.  Clearly this has no value and doesn’t belong in the reviews.  However, after contacting Amazon and asking them to remove the review since it clearly wasn’t correct and should be seen, they replied to me saying that they understand my angst against the review, but that they didn’t want to get involved or start removing reviews.  Really?

Won’t Get Involved You Say?

Well Amazon, why then did you remove a couple of my 5 star reviews?
Yep…I noticed.  I had 76 5 star reviews and then a couple of days later, it was 72.  So, tell me how your “aren’t getting involved?”  Oh and by the way, I never work to get reviews illegally.  I understand all the rules and regulations, so don’t tell me that the review violated something of yours.  Ridiculous.

KU Changes?

But if that wasn’t bad enough, Amazon has now made a change to their KU policy.  Instead of paying authors based on the number of downloads a book gets, we will now be paid based on the number of pages someone reads.

Are you for real?

So, I now have to convince people to not only download my book, but also read it all the way to the end?  That’s pretty ridiculous in its own.

Now, at first I had hope that this wouldn’t be  a problem.  After all, I am a decent writer – at least I hope right – so, it shouldn’t affect me…wrong.

Since the KU change occurred, I have now lost over $1000 in revenue. It’s as if we authors not only have to provide a book that makes sales, but also gets read. Do you know how many legitimate books I have on my shelf that I haven’t read yet?  Should I have to pay for those books only when I read them?

So, first, Amazon doesn’t protect me from erroneous reviews that don’t help and now they just hit me with a bogus change that will have dramatic effects on my business and lifestyle.

Time for Diversification

Its times like these that I am happy that ebook platforms like Kobo and iTunes are still around.  Because of this, i will now be pushing and leaning more on them.  Kindle can’t be the only platform out there and as self-publishers, we need to understand this.

I intend to revolt in my own way and remove certain books from Amazon KDP to place/focus mainly on Smashword’s services.   Granted, I am not as powerful as many and it probably won’t make a dent, but…I’ll have peace of mind knowing that I did my part to send a small message to Amazon.