Amazon and Why It's Awesome

People love to pile up on Amazon, suggesting it's the Evil Empire and Jeff Bezos is Darth Vader. I disagree. In fact, I tend to think of Bezos as the best thing to happen to authors since Google.

My story:

Carolyn and I wrote a book called Letters From Greece.

We published it with Lyrical Press, our publishers at the time. It sold poorly except for family. 

Lyrical sold itself to Kensington, we got rights back and we self-published the book. It sold a few copies. And when I say a few, I mean like 2 or 3. That's what sales are like.

Caveat:  most self-pubbed authors are not making money. We are not making money. If I see royalty payments for more than $10 a month I feel like a self-pubbing millionaire. Oh yeah. Eat me Courtney Milan! Ha!

So my file is messed up for Letters and I can't get it on Nook so right now it's Amazon only. And yes, I know about Smashwords and Kobo and All Romance and my sales there have been nil. Nada. Not worth the trouble of formatting. Amazon and B&N are the only games in Lori-town.

So Letters in Amazon only and signed up for KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) which means it's Amazon only and one can run it free or play with it and Amazon loans it out in the KDP library. That's my only book that's KDP by the way. 

And Amazon did a soft promotion on it this summer (it is a good summer read). I have no idea what they did actually. But I did get an email from Amazon suggesting I might like to by it. And I imagine it's showed up in a few "If you like that, you might like this..."

How do I know this? Sales. Our sales have picked up. Again, not in the hundreds. More like 30 - 35 books monthly. But for us that's huge. It's outselling our other books and for once making the numbers fun. 

I'm still not going to put my books Amazon only because seriously, Yesterday's Headline, my favorite book, sells better on B&N. And I want people to read it.  But I do love me some Amazon.