In the first part of 2012, shortly after my husband died, I started my author gig. Amazon had already launched their indie publishing in 2007, so why not? Why not see if I could make money off his unpublished stories. Bob wasn’t around anymore to tell me what I couldn’t make changes to (edit) them. 🤣😂
What I didn’t know, what no one anticipated, maybe not even Amazon, were the flood gates that were opened. Well, maybe Jeff did. He’s one smart cookie. Still …
Suddenly, everyone and their mother thought they could get rich quick by uploading their books to Amazon. All those half-baked ides for stories got feed into Amazon’s machine and churned out to the masses. Sadly, a lot of those indie books were trash. They ended up putting a bad taste in readers mouths, and now, being a self-published author will brand you as not ‘being a real author.’ Ugh!
Fast forward to 2023, and Amazon has over 32.8 million published titles. Yowza!!!
So? What does this have to do with direct buying?
Well, Amazon ended up with a major problem. They had scammers uploading eBooks left and right to make money off Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program. Authors get paid a very small amount, like $0.00427 per page read. Yep, Less than a penny for each page a reader flips on their kindle.
However, they have a Star Seller Program that pays a huge dividend to authors with massive page reads. So scammers found a way to either pad their eBooks with worthless content or paid people to flip through pages to get those bonuses.
This resulted in Amazon cracking down and deleting accounts like crazy. Many legitimate authors got caught up in the net. Suddenly, their revenue stream was gone. Some of them got their accounts reinstated, after suffering major losses, but some never did. So they had no alternative but to go wide. Which is another can of worms, and one I won’t get into here.
Suffice it to say, they learned not to put all their eggs in one basket.
Which meant going wide, which means their books aren’t exclusive to Amazon. Now they can sell them on Apple, Nook, and Google Play, to name a few retailers. But this also comes with it’s own headaches.
For one, they’re still dealing with another platform’s tech issues, and their royalties are being split up even more. Authors don’t make much money per book as is. Readers think they should be able to read for free. sigh.
So, in the past several years, especially 2023, authors are really looking at selling direct. This is something Julie and I have wanted to do with Norns since it’s inception, but there were other areas of the business we had to deal with first.
Selling direct isn’t easy either. If you’re a well-known author, no big deal. They have followers all over their social media sites. But for lesser known writes, or even small presses, like ours, it can be a big hurdle.
Still, there are many readers tired of putting their hard-earned money in giant corporations that don’t care a whit about them. And the best thing selling direct, is, the royalties are ours minus some transaction fees. So more money in our pocket and our authors. It’s a win-win.
Of course, we’ll still keep our books wide to all the other platforms, but now we CONTROL what happens to our sales, and we’re not at the mercy of Amazon, Ingramspark, etc.
We’re still in the process of adding our older titles, plus are new releases, to the store on our website. At this time, we’re only offering eBooks. Hopefully, in the future, we’ll be able to do the print or hardcopy versions. Hopefully.
If you’re squeamish about using your credit card on an unknown website, and you’re an Etsy buyer, we also have a store there. Yay!
So, help support our business and our authors by buying direct. If you see one of our books that isn’t listed yet, just give us a holler and we’ll get it active ASAP.
We’d really appreciate it. Thank you. 😘🥰🧡🧡
