Yes, it's an issue I've often seen. I really dislike this practice from Amazon. I can understand author's doing it since it's tough for self published authors to earn money but it's a monopolistic practice on the part of Amazon that doesn't sit well with me.
I didn't publish on Kobo's platform because their software arbitrarily decided that I wasn't allowed to, and none of my attempts to communicate with a customer service human to find out why generated any response.
I figured that I could still sell on Kobo via Smashwords, so didn't give it much thought.
In the end, my book is now exclusive to Amazon KDP for one, and only one, reason:
- royalties from Amazon = $24.60
- royalties from everyone else = $0
(It's not the amount. It's the principle.)
I was already de facto exclusive to Amazon, anyway.
I'm sure your readers appreciate being forced to purchase DRM-crippled copies of your book from a monopolist. Have you considered offering DRM-free EPUB downloads directly on your own site?
As should be apparent from the amount of the royalty, I don't have a significant quantity of readers. They all chose to buy the book via Amazon when it was also available on other [non-DRM] platforms.
I didn't force my readers to do anything. I followed their money to the only platform that paid off.
I have also elected to keep my day job. Offering free downloads wouldn't even be a waste of bandwidth, really--just a waste of server disk space. I don't have interests in both writing and marketing, so it doesn't make much difference to me if I am not making any money because no one knows who I am, rather than not making any money because nobody who knows who I am can figure out how to pay me anything.
Also, the only person who bought the book for whom I can be certain that they actually read it is my Mom, who left the most passive-aggressive 5-star review I have ever seen--simultaneously shilling for it and telling me how I should write the next book.
> Offering free downloads wouldn't even be a waste of bandwidth, really--just a waste of server disk space
You are very humble. :) I would be very surprised if there isn't someone who considered reading your work but didn't because it wasn't available online for free.
In fact, if your comment contained a direct link to a free copy of your work, someone from HN would already have looked.
Such a post would definitively link a pseudonym username to a real name. I'd have to create a throwaway.
It would also be offtopic anywhere but a Show HN thread, and even then seems iffy. The only bit of technical interest would be the script I wrote to finagle 7Zip into outputting a valid .EPUB file. 7Zip and plaintext editors were the only tools used. I'm not sure whether I am more afraid that no one would look, or that it would get an HN hug of death.
