When online bookstores began to take off, Amazon quickly established itself as the biggest dealer in the field. Sure there were other bookstores, for example, Fishpond, but they paled beside the giant Amazon. We’re talking hard copy here.
When Amazon saw the trend towards e-books, it hopped right in and again established itself as the biggest retailer. Sure, there were other e-book distributors — Apple iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo, Smashwords and others — but Amazon was the biggest. A huge industry sprang up. Writers could self-publish their books and put them on many different distribution platforms.
Looking good. Good for the writers, good for the e-book publishers and distributors. A nice competitive industry.
Then Amazon produced the Amazon Kindle, a series of e-book readers that enable users to shop for, download, browse and read e-books, newspapers, magazines, blogs and other digital media via wireless networking (source: Wikipedia). Amazon has now launched what it calls Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing or Amazon KDP. With this, a writer can get his book published by Amazon and have it go directly to Kindle, which is grabbing a large share of the applications market with the introduction of its Kindle software for use on various platforms such as Microsoft Windows, iOS, Blackberry, MacOSX (10.5 onward, Intel only), Android, webOS and Windows Phone (source: Wikipedia). The most recent refinement of all this is Amazon KDP Select.
Amazon KDP Select. This sounds good — until you read the small print in Amazon’s Terms and Conditions: https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=APILE934L348N
To paraphrase this small print: While or the time your book is enrolled in the program, you must agree not to distribute or sell your book ANYWHERE ELSE. This includes your own personal blog or web site. Your title must be 100% exclusive to Amazon.
If you violate this at any point during the 3-month enrolment period, or you remove your book from the program so you can distribute it elsewhere, you risk forfeited earnings, delayed payments, a lien on future earnings – or getting kicked out of the Kindle Direct Publishing program altogether.
After the obligatory 3 months, your enrolment in the KDP Select continues unless you go through the process of opting out. Forget, and you’re up for another 3 months.
This forces the author to remove the book from sale from the Apple iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo, Smashwords and others, thereby causing the author to lose out on sales from competing retailers.
By withdrawing a title from any retailer, the author destroys any accrued sales ranking in their lists, making their book less visible and less discoverable should they reactivate distribution to competing retailers.
Do authors want to be totally dependent upon Amazon for sales? New writers are desperate; they will do almost anything to sell their books. And they know that with Amazon KDP, more customers are motivated to go straight to Amazon since Amazon has this exclusive content.
It’s a clever ploy on Amazon’s part. As Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords says, The new Amazon KDP Select program look s like a predatory business practice (ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-competitive_practices). Pretty soon, Amazon can use the opportunity to leverage their dominance as the world’s largest e-book retailer (and world’s largest payer to indie authors) to attain monopolistic advantage by effectively denying its competing retailers (Apple, B&N, Kobo, Sony, etc) access to the books from indie authors.
Indies are the future of book publishing. In the US, in the last three months of 2010, Amazon’s sales of e-books surpassed that of paperbacks for the first time.
Think about this. It might pay indie authors to recognise that their long term interests are best served by having a competitive global ebook retailing ecosystem. Mark Coker recommends an author distribute their book to as many retailers as possible. Many ebook retailers, all working to attract readers to books, will surely serve indie authors better in the long run than a single retailer who can dictate all the terms.
But whoever thinks of the long run? The long run is everyone’s poor relation, doomed to be steamrollered by the bullies of expediency and money.
The contents of this blog are based on a blog by Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords. The original, more comprehensive article can be found at: blog.smashwords.com/2011/12/amazon-shows-predatory-spots-with-kdp.html
Next Week: A review of Australian author Michael Sala’s debut novel The Last Thread published by Affirm Press.
Danielle de Valera 
The fatal flaw of this post is that throughout most of it you’re talking about KDP when what you mean is KDP Select. KDP doesn’t require exclusivity. Select does. The small print you’re quoting–and Mark’s blog post–refer *only* to KDP Select. You need to get your facts straight.
Hi Danielle,
Great post. I sent Amazon an email saying they should limit the downloads kindle users are allowed to make. We’ll see if they respond.
Thanks, Louise, BUT as you can see from the comment by Catana below, I forgot to add the very important word Select when I talked about Amazon KDP! Will go in and fix it now.
Monday 5.35 p.m. Australian Daylight Saving Time.
I didn’t even notice. 🙂
Thanks for the comment on my blog, Danielle. A word does make a big difference. I recently added one of my Smashwords books to Amazon, to see how it goes, since I believe in getting the widest distribution possible. I’d prefer not to publish on Amazon at all, but Smashwords isn’t going to provide the sales I’d like to see. However, I see Amazon’s practices as predatory, especially the Select program, and will not be joining it. My plan is to publish each book at Smashwords first, then add it to Amazon a few months later. That way, I will support Smashwords and gradually increase my Amazon presence and sales.
I think that’s the best way to go, Catana. I notice on twitter that Derek Haines of WhizzBouzz (UK?), who’s been in the publishing side of things quite a while, has just done the same thing with one of his books. But he won’t be using Select either. My friend and client Louise Forster, author of the rom-com FINDING VERONCIA, went with Select without understanding the implications. She’s now locked in until March. We live and learn. it’s a jungle out there, but I figure as long as we writers continue to support one another, we’ll get through.
Sorry your friend got hooked into Select. When I was going through the process of posting my novel to Amazon, I noticed that the very first thing you see is the signup for Select. I suspect that a lot of people don’t pay attention and assume they have to join. Amazon probably has some of the top people in market research and they know very well that they’ll get a lot of signups that way.
One of the best things about blogging, for me, is sharing information. As you said, it’s a jungle out there. When we learn how to negotiate it, we need to pass it on to others. But it’s discouraging how many blog posts I skim through where newcomers to self-publishing are setting themselves up for problems because they don’t have the information they need.
Whilst I hear what you are saying, I have to say that it depends what you want to achieve. One of my books was promoted on KDP select, with a free giveaway for a period of five days. After giving away over 10,000 books, I got five positive reviews, since then sales have taken off.
In January ’12 the book was ‘borrowed’ 40 times, earning $1.60 per borrow. Whilst I appreciate that the fee for borrows will inevitably decline as more publishers catch on to this, this represents people reading my book and real money in my pocket – I’m happy with that!
That’s wonderful to hear, Jen, and also very interesting. Derek Haines of WhizzBuzz seems to be thinking along the same lines. Sorry I couldn’t get back to you before, I’ve been away in the wilds of New Zealand for 10 days, only just returning last night. Thanks for the comment and good luck with your writing!