The Dark Side of Self-Publishing
Self-published writers act as individuals, have no group protection such as an international union that would stand up for and protect their rights, and are thus highly vulnerable to exploitation and abuse
Self-publishing is akin to trying to make it in the Wild West — there are few laws and rules, the elusive promise of gold, freedom, and success, and many gangs of villains who will rob and take advantage of whomever they can.
Yet writers are drawn to self-publishing like a moth to a flame. With the unprecedented success of J.K. Rowling and the phenomenon of 50 Shades of Grey, writing became trendy and fashionable. Rowling has been treated like a movie star and now everybody is dreaming of living that kind of life.
I wasn’t in the least surprised when story after story of sexual exploitation in Hollywood came to the surface. When there are so many desperate wannabe stars but only a few who can make it, the stage for abuse has been set.
When that happens, the price one has to pay to get to the top becomes high — so high that it is often unacceptable.
Nowadays everybody wants to be a writer, and the price, likewise, became extreme. Not in terms of sexual abuse, though, since most of the writers aren’t particularly sexy and self-publishing business is done mostly online anyway, but in the form of economic abuse.
Writers are being forced into either swimming in the muddy waters of self-publishing industry or else being pushed out of the game altogether. All too often, they are being swindled out of their money for shady services that will never bring any results let alone the return on investment.
No one protects self-published writers’ rights in an organized manner that could offer efficient protection from the unscrupulous business practices. Trusting in good faith of businesses related to self-publishing would be naive — most of them are not here to really care for writers, even though they sell services to them.
They are here for one reason and one reason alone — to make a profit. Often this means they are just grabbing the money and not delivering any results in return. They will take smaller sums from many individual writers — too little to be of interest to the law enforcement and worth fighting for by an individual. This makes taking any legal action hard if not impossible.
When you add these small gains, however, the profits these people make off of writers are anything but small. But as unpleasant and frustrating as this might be, this is not even the main problem. The main problem with self-publishing industry is how terribly non-transparent and unpredictable it is.
The muddy waters of self-publishing industry
For the last few days, the writers who have self-published on Amazon KDP are seeing the following message on their Reports page: “KDP reports are experiencing issues and your sales or royalties may be delayed.” This has been going on for days now, with no official explanation either through email or on the forum where many writers expressed their growing concerns.
Since it’s December, many writers (myself included) have launched new books and invested in promotion. With these unexplained ‘issues’ going on, we have no means of understanding how efficient our promotion activities have been, and knowing have we made any sales or are the numbers reported correct — we are simply being left in the dark, with no explanation or apology.
When things like that happen, one becomes acutely aware of not only how vulnerable one is in this industry, but how little insight writers have into the working of self-publishing platforms and related businesses. We have no means of checking the platform’s numbers related to the sales of our books. We have no insight into what is going on behind the curtain.
I have, for instance, noted a big disparity between my royalties in September and the sales of my books shown in the History chart on the Amazon KDP Reports — almost half of the ebook sales shown in the History chart where missing from my September sales report and royalty payments.
I had to send numerous emails to KDP customer support before I finally received a response, and it sounded pretty unconvincing to me. Their claim was that the ebooks were ordered but that the credit cards of the buyers couldn’t be processed. For half of all of the sales? How weird is that!
I now wonder is this weird discrepancy in the sales reports related to the current Amazon KDP ‘issues,’ but I have no means of checking that or doing anything about it.
Just to make that clear — this is not just the problem with Amazon KDP. Non-transparency is a problem with ALL of the self-publishing platforms. I only used Amazon KDP as the most recent, but hardly the only case. Writers have a zero degree of control over how many of their books get printed and how many copies of books and ebooks are being sold on these platforms.
Being left at the mercy of unexpected policy changes
Since it became so hard to earn anything but a few bucks with self-publishing, many writers look for other ways of funding their books. One such option is Patreon where supporters can contribute monthly donations to support creators and thus make their work possible.
This looked like a great option and I’ve tried it out myself. It, however, turned out to be a yet another example of unpredictable changes that can affect one’s income to an uncomfortably large degree with no fair warning. To make December even more challenging for those who self-publish on Amazon KDP and also rely on Patreon for support, all hell broke loose on this platform too.
At the beginning of December, Patreon team casually sent out an email letting us know that they are launching a new policy — a policy that enraged the patrons and creators alike. The management decided on a whim that Patreon will charge patrons additional fees on the top of their contributions.
As a result, many of patrons withdrew their support and many creators decided to leave the platform.
Patreon’s inconsiderate approach to implementing this new policy was astounding and, to say the least, extremely unfair. The undesirable consequences, however, could have been easily avoided simply by giving the patrons a choice or asking them in advance how they would feel about this new policy before enforcing it. Why was that so hard to do?
Clearly, writers and creators are not being treated as equals here. Even though these platforms make money solely off of our work and the payments by our readers and supporters, they do not see nor treat us as worthy of respect, consideration, clear communication, and fair cooperation.
It’s as if writers and creators were put on the face of this earth for a single purpose — so that these businesses can now make a nice living off of our work while we struggle to survive.
As things stand, these platforms do not seem to function in the best interest of the creators whose work they are ripping their profits off. It’s clear from how they behave that they care about their own shortsighted self-interests first and about everybody else second. Such approach, though, is not an example of a balanced win-win solution that would be beneficial for all.
Update December 13, 2017 — to their credit, Patreon issued an apology and will not move forward with the changes, so there is hope.
Book promotion business — a gold mine, only not for writers
Here is another ‘interesting’ part of the self-publishing industry — the book promotion websites. There are hundreds of them with new ones popping up all over the place. Why? Because they’ve got to be at the top of the most profitable and shady niches in this business.
The book promos they sell mean that your book will appear in their daily email newsletter. They charge anywhere from $10 to the extreme of several thousand dollars for including your book in a single email. All of them make claims how they have tens of thousands of subscribers, but so far I have yet to find one that will produce any proof of such claims or show how many of these subscribers actually open and click the links in their emails.
I’ve tested about six such pages so far. Promos for my books produced some sales with only two of them, while the rest of them resulted in absolutely nothing. I achieved the best results with one site that charged $40 per email. There was indeed a significant spike in my book sales on the day of promotion, as I sold 25 ebooks priced at $0.99.
Since I earn 35% of every sale of low priced books on Amazon, however, that translated into $8.75 royalties minus 5% tax. The promotion thus led to a loss of over $30 but it did significantly raise the ranking of my book for a couple of days. Other writers I follow reported similar numbers when they use such promotions — from 20 to 30 books, sometimes less, rarely more.
These sites send out an email every day and there were 13 other books in the email that promoted my book. Do the math and compare their daily profit to the earnings of writers who wrote and self-published those books. Keep in mind that sending out an email takes significantly less effort than writing, editing, designing, formatting, and self-publishing a whole book.
It doesn’t make sense. The earning are disproportional to an absolutely astounding degree, and such deals are anything but fair. They are, for the most part, a blatant rip-off. So why do these websites nevertheless manage to pass such deals and thrive?
The answer lies in competition
This is so because the level of competition self-published writers have to deal with is insane. There are over 8MIO books and over 1MIO ebooks published on Amazon KDP. I worked in marketing — comparing to this, promoting most any other product is a piece of cake, for most of them only have to compete with a handful of similar items. Self-published books have to compete with tens of thousands of other books! It’s insane!
Does it make sense to be a self-published writer?
In my experience, being a self-published writer as a business makes no financial sense whatsoever — at least not for the vast majority of writers. Writing, self-publishing, and promoting books takes way too much work and investments. Given how unpredictable and abusive the market is, the profits are far from guaranteed and losses all too common. This is not an example of a good and reliable business, it’s an example of an incredibly harsh and brutal industry where profit margins are low to non-existent. So writers beware.
