brendan halpin

I’ve seen significant discussion recently among writers about leaving Amazon. I did this (kind of! See below!) a few years back, so I thought I’d share my findings.

The Caveat: Most of the books I wrote in my first decade as a professional writer are distributed as ebooks (and in some cases, audiobooks) by Open Road, who makes them available on Amazon. Amazon gets a cut, Open Road gets a cut, and I get a cut. My books, which never exactly burned up the sales chart, don’t sell very well except when there’s a sale, and I don’t make much money from my cut of a $1.99 ebook. Between all 11 books, I make a low 3-figure paycheck every year. Which is nice! Don’t get me wrong! But I can’t claim to be completely disentangled from Bezos’ tentacles.

Why I Left: This was mostly personal for me. I hadn’t gotten a book professionally published since 2012, and chasing an ever more elusive payday was ruining the fun of writing for me. Amazon gives you lots of stats to check, and there’s a lot of advice out there about how to game the algorithm by tweaking your keywords and categories, and I was doing all that and still not selling many copies and I just didn’t want to do any of that shit anymore.

But also, I figured I should put my (lack of) money where my mouth was, capitalism wise. That is to say, I am fortunate enough to have found a day job that pays the bills. (This took me 7 years after I got laid off in 2016. Don’t get laid off in middle age, kids! Best way to avoid this is to unionize!) So while it’s delightful to get paid for my writing, I no longer need it to meet my expenses. So I’ve made all my ebooks pay-what-you-want so everybody can access and enjoy them.

I stopped worrying about branding and whether I was writing what readers wanted to buy. I just wrote what I wanted!

Conclusions:

Removing money from the equation has made writing much more fun for me. And so I’m glad I jumped ship when I did. Your options aren’t limited to traditional publishing and Amazon. There’s another way to get books in front of the public, and that’s to sell them yourself. Or, you know, give ‘em away.

Having said that, I’m not a marketer and I’m not moving many copies of my books. They are there for the curious, but most people aren’t curious. They’re not discoverable on Amazon, so you really have to go looking for them if you want them. Most people don’t want to work that hard, and I don’t blame them!

But every time someone does grab one of my books, it is thrilling. Before, I would always complain about who wasn’t buying my books. “Oh, I only sold 1000 copies” or whatever. Now if I were to get a thousand people to read one of my books, paid or not, I’d be thrilled to have successfully shared my art with that many people. Capitalism really devalues the connection between artist and audience, and I really enjoy having that connection back, being happy to have reached a reader instead of sad that I’m not doing numbers. It’s damn hard to get someone to read a novel you’ve written. Don’t believe me? Start asking your friends to read yours. So getting even one reader is a win worth celebrating.

Recommendations

Should you leave Amazon? If your objections are professional—you’re putting work in to send buyers to Amazon, who’s taking a huge chunk of your revenue, and you have no idea if you’re gaming the algorithm correctly, and you want more control, I would say, yes, leave and sell books yourself. (Make sure you have an email list. You do have an email list, right? I mean, I suck at marketing, and even I have an email list!) (BTW I use email octopus for my list because they don’t train AI on my emails and don’t sell my subscribers’ emails. At least they didn’t when I moved there from mailchimp. Maybe they’ve gotten shittier.)

If your objections are ideological, I get it, I sympathize, and I offer my experience as a cautionary tale. Because I was an early adopter of Gumroad and moved all my books there and they take a smaller cut than Amazon and have cool tools that someone better than me at this stuff could probably use to their advantage— you can do stuff like telling everyone who bought a mystery novel from you that you have a new mystery out without bugging the people who bought the YA novel and aren’t interested in mystery. Or send an automatic follow-up email a month after they buy thanking them for buying and asking them to recommend your book to a friend. You get the idea. They’re all about helping you build a loyal audience.

So where’s the cautionary part? Well, Gumroad CEO Sahil Lavingia works for DOGE and so is personally enabling the technofascist dismantling of the federal government. So great, I’m out of the Bezos and into the Musk. I think that trying to find a tech company that’s not run by an amoral, Ayn-Rand-addled sociopath is probably impossible. So if you’re happy with the deal you’ve got with Amazon from a professional standpoint, there’s probably no point in moving to another company because it’s not that another company isn’t run by horrible people; it’s just that you don’t know the ways in which they’re horrible YET.

I hope my experience will help you clarify your thinking and decisionmaking. Hey, while you’re here, why not grab a free book?