Ah, I got fired up tonight and wrote a post for my personal site about Amazon and their shitty ways of mistreating people. If you’re bored, go read it. If you want to share in the hate, leave a comment. :-)
The incident left me deeply unsettled as an author who depends on KDP for a significant chunk of author earnings.
Although I’ve been wide with my books from the beginning and intended to stay that way, this made me even more so determined to stay away from exclusivity with anyone, but especially with Amazon. They just can’t be trusted. Whether it is incompetence, willful ignorance, or deliberate shady dealings by the employees in charge, there’s just no way to know. But I won’t risk it.
I finally started a Patreon and opened a Ko-fi account. I’ve been looking at some other alternative publishing paths, too. Specifically for a Kindle Vella story I started last year. I had put off branching out with it, even though they had to cave on their terms to allow authors to put their stories up with other paying markets, or risk no one being willing to give it a shot. I’m going to make sure I get that taken care of this month.
Amazon doesn’t deserve my exclusivity, anywhere, even for a little side project I only started to get me writing regularly again.
At the time the incident happened, I wasn’t in the mood to write about it. Then I was supposed to work on something tonight and my inner procrastinator came out. I started looking around for things to do, got reminded of how badly Amazon had pissed me off, and I wrote a post. :D And then a bit of another one here.
TL;DR, Amazon sucks can’t be trusted.