What the French, Toast?

Once again the Book world has gone crazy… I mean, nothing new if you’ve ever met an author and/or gone to an author event. We’re all crazy. This is a different crazy. I distributor kind of crazy. Lately, the Zon has decided that they need to start charging authors more for their paperbacks to be published, but also will give the authors LESS of their royalties. At this point, authors are basically getting paid pennies on the dollar for that $15 book you just bought. And I mean, for one of my $15 books I now get paid $3.40. That’s it… not even half. And e-books? Get the F*ck out of here. I make (maybe) $0.30 for a $4.99 e-book. The Zon, like most online retailers, gives 0 sh!ts about authors.

To prove my point, there has been a huge issue of piracy going around Author World. A website (that I will not disclose here) has been pirating books from authors that utilize KU. I am not an author that uses KU anymore, but the one book that was on KU for a brief time did get stolen and placed on said website. Just so you know, that does completely break the law and this website as well as others is now facing legal action from authors that are a lot more known than I am. I had one book pirated, where they had DOZENS. For this reason, and the Zon’s complete lack of appreciation and payment of authors, many are pulling from KU. Not to worry though, there are other (better) free sites! Thanks to D2D (Drafts 2 Digital), many authors, like myself, have been able to distribute wide to almost every e-book platform. Some of which are “library” platforms where you get to read the books for free! I highly recommend looking into this.

Are there any authors that remember Create Space? I miss that site so darn much. It was the place authors could go to create paperback copies of the books so they didn’t need to sell them on the Zon. I have very little paperback sales on the Zon because most people prefer E-books since they tend to be cheaper. I sell most of my paperbacks at signing events. Create Space made it so easy to order my author copies for events without having them be for sale to the public. So, I could upload my paperback and then just order copies. The Zon requires authors to make the book “for sale” to the public in order to get those same copies. Authors have been forced to price their books ridiculous to keep people from buying early. I just had to make me new release $200 so I could order copies for my upcoming event. I miss Create Space. I wish it, or something like it, were still around.

*sigh* the life of a struggling author…