How to Avoid Publishing Your Book on Amazon as an Author

I released a video a few months ago on Amazon scams. And a lot of people thought the solution to avoid these scams was to avoid Amazon. There's a lot of the same reactions that I saw recently when Jane Friedman, a publishing expert and creator to the publishing newsletter the Hot Sheet, revealed that she had been scammed on Amazon. People were publishing books under her name that weren't her books. And a lot of the reaction to that was, well, don't publish your books on Amazon. And I get it. I understand why you want to avoid Amazon. And we've had a few authors want to avoid Amazon for other reasons. So if you're wondering about that and what to do, well, this video is for you. Hey there. I'm Julie the Book Broad, founder of Book Launchers, author of four self published books, and of course your host here at Book Launchers tv, where I hope you're subscribed so we can hang out every Tuesday and Friday when we have new videos come out. All right, let's talk about Amazon for a minute. In many ways, I see them as an indie author blessing and curse. They're a blessing in many ways because they have in fact enabled authors to make a lot of money publishing books without gatekeepers. It has never been so easy to sell your book without a publisher, and that is in large part thanks to Amazon. Now, the curse comes in the fact that they're also so big, they really don't care about any one author all that much. And they have more bots than humans that work there, I swear. Of course, if you're in the middle of dealing with scammers, I have a video on that as well as a couple of quick tips that I'll share right now. If your book has been pirated, there's a clear channel for reporting infringement with Amazon. And we've talked about that here before. Do that first. Jane Friedman's case was interesting in that copyright or trademark infringement weren't the case. Someone impersonated her and traded off her good name and reputation and brand. There isn't a box for somebody pretending to be me on Amazon. They so her case was not simple in the eyes of Amazon, even though it really should have been. And this is where the hate and frustration of working with KDP and Amazon comes from. What should have been a very quick and easy thing for them to resolve took a lot of effort on Jane's part to resolve, and that happens a lot when you've been scammed by scammers on Amazon. So a lot of people's Answer is don't deal with Amazon. And sure, that sort of seems like a good answer and it is an option. But. And this is a big but, to truly avoid Amazon, you just have to sell your book direct. So that means you're the one selling your book off your website through your own direct methods like Kickstarter. And you're not listing through any catalog. Because you see, as soon as you use IngramSpark or even Lulu or other print on demand type systems, guess what? You can't opt out of Amazon. We've tried. One of our authors was adamant we avoid Amazon completely with her book. She insisted it could not be sold on Amazon and we tried everything to avoid it from being listed there. But there were two things we couldn't avoid. Ingramspark still made an Amazon listing and secondary sellers got it and voila, it was on Amazon. What you can do is direct your audience to buy direct from you, like I do when I tell you to go to self publishandsucceed.com, but the reality is that a lot of consumers will still pull up Amazon and buy your book there. You can promote and drive traffic to local indie stores all day long, but there are still people who buy all their books on Amazon or Audible. And here's the kicker that I think you should understand. You can avoid Amazon completely, but if you become popular and a name people search for, a scammer can still target you. In fact, that might make it easier for them to target you. By not being on Amazon legitimately, you create this huge opportunity for scammers to list your book on Amazon and sell it as a pirated version. Because you're not. This was one of the scams we talked about before, which was pirated versions of books that were missing a format. And so if you didn't have an ebook as an example, but you had a good selling book, scammers created a bad version of your ebook and sold it. Anyone who has a name that people search for is at risk of being the victim of a scam on Amazon. So you can try and avoid Amazon all you want, but really all you're doing is limiting your reach to the consumer. You. You're not protecting yourself from being scammed if you do that. Now, to be clear, I am not saying don't try to avoid Amazon. It's a choice. And I understand why some authors are passionate that they won't support Amazon with their book. I get it. I'm just saying that you can't think that avoiding Amazon will protect you from being scammed because it won't. This is something that Amazon needs to address and really all we can do as an author community is support organizations like Ally that, the Author Guild, ibpa. They're advocating for change and they keep supporting authors and then keep publishing books people want to read. And while it's a pain in the butt to go through this, there's some small joy in knowing that you've become popular enough that your name or book is appealing to scammers. Okay, I realize there's not much joy in that, but I can't help but try to see the bright side of this. So go ahead and comment any thoughts you have on this below. And then, well, you're probably wanting to watch that one on Amazon Scams, so. So that's over here. It also has a cool tool to download with some preventative advice. So go there. And then if you're ready for something to help you build a brand worthy of an imposter, well, this video on your author brand is right here. Both are awesome and I can't wait to see you over there.