This was originally published on Medium in May, 2022.

In recent weeks, the readers of TikTok (#booktok) have taken to the platform encouraging other bibliophiles to download books from Amazon — and then return them for a full return. Now, before everyone runs off to Amazon to download the entire series of Harry Potter, allow me to go on record with a warning. First, not all books available on Amazon are returnable. And second, for those that are returnable, Amazon will not allow you to return books all willy-nilly. In fact, returning items through Amazon works just like returns at any other store — do it too often or too many times in a given period, and it can get your account locked down or worse-get it banned completely.

For indie authors, book returns is nothing new. In fact, we have been receiving reduced royalties and charge-backs to our author accounts ever since we signed up with the platform. It’s always been Amazon’s rule, written into the Terms of Service, that we are responsible for any returned books, resulting in reduced royalties and charge-backs. This means readers have ample opportunity to buy, read, and return a book for a full return — on our dime.

Before I get into the nuts-and-bolts of this story, let’s back up a bit. Most indie authors do not know publishing houses hammer out their own deals and contracts with Amazon. For many household names like Rice and Rowling, they are allowed to have certain books in Kindle Unlimited while still selling the books wide. Unfortunately, indie authors must abide by the same Terms of Service as every other indie author using Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing platform. This means any books we enroll into the KU program must be made exclusive to that platform, we foot the bill for returned ebooks, and a host of other contractual obligations. It’s a one-size-fits-all Terms of Service meant to benefit Amazon, and stiff the author in the process.

The larger publishing houses have a lot more pull where Amazon is concerned. This means not only different contracts and Terms of Services for each house, bit it also means different contracts for different authors and/or different books. Returns are a huge part of any contract. The last thing publishers want to get hit with, indie authors included, is a huge charge-back to their publisher accounts for returns, or reduced royalty payments, due to a massive number of book returns. This is why many houses will negotiate with Amazon on their contracts, trying to reduce the publisher’s liability as much as possible.

Now we have a large group of people (readers) on a large platform (TikTok) all sharing their wisdom on how to get away with reading an endless supply of books that they never have to pay for, all at the expense of indie authors. Enter the Author’s Guild.

Several weeks ago I was invited to a private group of authors who had banned together to get behind the AG as they drew up plans to meet with Amazon representatives and present their demands for Amazon to stop allowing ebook returns — full stop. Two days to return a book when purchased by mistake, but no returns on books where more than 25% of the file had been accessed through Kindle.

It makes sense to us. Every book offers a 10% “look inside” free sample. There is literally no reason why someone would return a book after reading any or all of it, unless they did no specifically to get away with paying for the item. It’s theft, pure and simple. Well, it’s simple to the authors this is happening to. And the AG was ready to go into battle to make this point.

To my knowledge, the meeting the AG had requested on 4/25/2022 did not actually happen. According to the AG, when they first contacted Amazon regarding the policy and their request set up a meeting specifically to discuss the issue, Amazon’s reply was that their data did not show an increase in book returns. And when shown instances from members of the AG, Amazon stated they believed the increase in returns of books by those specific authors was the result of those authors’ marketing activities.

In other words, they do not see a problem and have no intentions of changing their policy. In response, many authors have been spamming Amazon’s emails with demands to change the policy, blowing up various Amazon accounts on Twitter, including the CEO, and spamming the author help box inside the authors’ KDP dashboards. The spam has gotten so bad, Amazon has since disabled these email accounts. And the author help box within their KDP dashboard? That page has been recoded so that the box is no longer there. Instead, you have to upload a file.

Is this a bad idea for authors to do? Oh, let me count the ways.

I have said from the beginning that this entire campaign was not going to change anything. If anything, it could spell potential disaster for many indie authors. Amazon has already proven time and again that they do not take indie authors seriously on their platform. And abusing the very avenues put there to help authors is only going to make things worse. In fact, I wouldn’t put it past the mighty Zon to start disabling author KDP dashboards — or worse. We’ve seen it happen before whenever indie authors made too much of a fuss over something. They started banning accounts left and right, not even bothering to see if the accounts they were banning were actually guilty of anything. Most of it was just a show of force — start banning accounts, and the rest of the complainers will tuck-tail and run in hopes of avoiding the same fate. And it’s worked, time and again.

But — why will our voices go unheard? If independently published books make up approximately 98% of all books published, then why do they show so little regard to our complaints? Why do they negotiate contracts with traditional publishers while sweeping us to the side?

To answer this question, I did some deep digging into Amazon’s 2021 statistics. Let me just say, I know why Amazon thinks so little of us.

In 2021, the top Big 5 (now the Big 4 thanks to mergers) were responsible for approximately 80% of all books sold. Not books published — book SOLD. This means that out of the all the books sold in 2021, 80% of those books were published by one of the large traditional publishers. Add in the rest of the traditional publishers and small presses, and you are looking at 90% of all books sold in 2021 being a traditionally published book. For indie authors, only 10% of those books sales were attributed to self-published books.

We all know that Amazon is the largest book retailer. However, book sales only account for just under 10% of Amazon’s total revenues for 2021. With indie published book sales making up approximately 10% of all books sold, this means the total Amazon revenue attributed to independently published book sales is less than 1%.

This is why Amazon does not take indie author demands seriously. The amount of money we bring to the very large Amazon table is miniscule in comparison to everything else, including traditional book sales. With so little to offer the company as a whole, is it any wonder they lumped us all together under a one-size-fits-all Terms of Service, and then take away all avenue of communications when we don’t get our way? The only thing a $7+ Billion-Dollar-a-Year company understands is money. And until we step up our game and hurt them where it counts, I’m afraid we are always going to be the underdog where KDP is concerned.