Welcome to your biweekly “Assistance” Is Out Now in the New Sixth Edition of The Quiet Reader Magazine promotional newsletter, which also contains writing content below the fold. I hope you read and enjoyed “Assistance” because who knows when there will be another one? I mean, more short stories exist but who knows when one will be publicly available. Click the button so I will stop bugging you about it.
Good morning. I hope your coffee is your favorite temperature and that your sleep last night was restful. If you are an old fogey like me you’re going to need fortification to talk Tok. TikTok, that is.
Listen, I’m usually the first person to jump on any stupid new thing. I stood in line outside a store at midnight one time to buy a Nintendo Wii. Maybe as I’ve gotten older I’ve begun to lose touch with those things that are new and hip—no, that’s not it. The problem is I hate watching videos on the internet and TikTok is video based. I don’t understand this phenomenon—nobody around me does—but I bristle up when someone tries to hand me their phone to “just look at this video real quick.” If it’s not 8 uninterrupted hours of brown noise on a loop with a black screen, I am not interested.
Anyway I’m an absolute curmudgeon when it comes to watching video, but that is not my beef with TikTok, today or any day. I won’t watch TikTok personally because I hate watching videos, but I do appreciate the existence of TikTok. For those who don’t know it seems to be a social media channel like Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook, where the mode of sharing is brief videos instead of, respectively, 280-character messages, photos of food, or boomer-humor memes about hating your spouse.
TikTok has been home to a number of viral events but old people like me might best remember it from the Tide Pod Challenge, where users were eating tide pods on camera for likes or hearts or whatever kind of validation you get on there. I do occasionally see TikTok content when a video makes its way to another social media site that I do use, for instance, I saw Grandma’s Succulent Tour on Youtube and one time on Instagram I saw a “viral TikTok recipe for homemade shower cleaner” so I made it and now my shower needs to be regrouted. Don’t trust everything a twenty-two-year-old housewife tells you on the internet.
The section of TikTok devoted to books and book-related stuff is called BookTok. You would never have guessed that; I know. BookTok is home to content creators making video book reviews, book recommendations, intricate book jokes and memes, and fun or exciting book ideas and challenges. The BookTok section of TikTok is successful enough at moving book product that major book retailers have pages just to showcase the books that are big on TikTok—see, for instance, those pages at Barnes and Noble and Books-a-Million.
BookTok is a huge community of enthusiastic readers and if your book gets on their radar, good for you. I’m sure it’s a great place to market your book. Look, it’s got to be better than the cesspit that is #WritingTwitter. However—and here we get down to the topic of today’s Shelf Life—as with all social media, it’s not all sunshine and roses. Sometimes it’s also garbage.
Recently, a tweet went viral over on the birdspace (I know this is supposed to be about TikTok, we’ll get back to that) from an indie (ie: self-published) author complaining about the new viral TikTok trend of purchasing ebooks on Kindle, reading them in full, and then returning them for a refund. Here’s the tweet:
Today’s Shelf Life is about both the situation with the TikTok “tip” for getting free books to read and about the hidden liabilities authors take on when we self publish.
Question: Why would an author owe money to Amazon if their book were purchased on Kindle and later returned? If they were credited a royalty for the sale of their book, wouldn’t an equal amount later be deducted from their royalties were the book returned? Even if the credit and the debit fell on different royalty statements, wouldn’t they balance out?
When you place a book for sale on Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), you choose from one of two royalty models: You choose whether you will receive a 35 percent royalty or a 70 percent royalty. “Well obviously I want the 70 percent royalty!” We’re all savvy enough here to know that different terms come with those two royalty models; among the differences in terms is a “delivery fee” that accompanies the 70-percent-model that is not present in the 35-percent model (see KDP terms of both royalty models). Under Part C, delivery costs, the terms state:
Delivery Costs are equal to the number of megabytes we determine your Digital Book file contains, multiplied by the Delivery Cost rate listed below.
The delivery cost rate for Amazon.com (the United States) is $0.15 per megabyte of your ebook file size. How many megabytes in an e-book? Depends on things like the length of your manuscript and presence of any art elements; 2 to 4 megabytes seems about average. Thirty to sixty cents delivery fee per unit sold.
Amazon gets that delivery fee for delivering the Kindle book to the Kindle customer. It is additional to whatever other money they make on the sale of the book.
Let’s say you sell a 2MB Kindle book to a customer for $10. Under the 70-percent royalty model, you’d get $7 in royalty and Amazon receives the other $3 of the book sale, and out of your $7 Amazon also takes 30 cents as the delivery fee. If the book is returned, Amazon gives back their $3 to the buyer and you give back your $7 to the buyer—but you didn’t get $7; you got $6.70 after the delivery fee. In that event, you are out 30 cents delivery fee.
That’s the why and how of self-published authors owing Amazon money when Kindle books are purchased and then returned.
In a previous article (Not So Many Happy Returns), I talked about how returns work in the book business with a focus on the implications for authors who self-publish. When a book is not eligible for return to the publisher, bookstores and libraries as a rule will not stock it because they depend on being able to “return” unsold stock to the publisher (normally stock is not physically returned, but destroyed, as the return shipping cost is more than the resale value of books that didn’t sell once already).
Many self-publishing authors choose to make their books non-eligible for return for this reason. If your books print on demand, you pay the manufacturer for the printing and shipping costs out of the sale of each book; if it is returned, you’re out those printing and shipping costs and those can add up quick.
You might not have thought you’d have to worry bout this with e-only titles but here we are, thanks BookTok. Ostensibly, BookTok users “figured out” that you can treat Kindle books like library books: Purchase, read, return, get a refund. Seems like a victimless crime if you don’t know about that delivery fee. (You wouldn’t download a car, would you!?)
I say “ostensibly” because there’s some debate about whether TikTok and BookTok are responsible for this gross trend. Everyone can point to the viral tweet complaining about the TikTok trend but I have not seen anyone produce the viral TikTok video starting the trend. If you look at the #returningbooks hashtag on TikTok, the top posts are all about the discourse around the ethics of returning e-books (with users for and against); none of the videos are “listen to this great free book hack I found.”
When authors or publishers opt out of return eligibility for their titles, that doesn’t apply to KDP. KDP does not allow authors to opt out of returns on the platform. After all, Amazon has a return policy for Kindle books across the board that they stand by and you can be sure Amazon is not going to eat the costs. It’s worth noting in their return policy that accounts with a high number of return requests may lose their ability to self-serve e-book refunds; presumably those accounts would be referred to some kind of customer service oversight when they request returns.
As an author, what can you do to make sure readers don’t abuse this return loophole to read your Kindle book for free and shortchange you the delivery charge? The short answer is, under the 70-percent-royalty-model—nothing. You could publish under the other royalty model (and lose out on royalties for every book sold to protect against what one hopes is a rare and also passing phenomenon). You could not publish on Kindle at all, but KDP is the self-publishing author’s bread and butter. That is simply not a viable option for most independent authors.
You can lobby Amazon, as many authors are doing now, to change the eligibility requirements for e-book returns such that a book that has been read a certain amount of the way through (100 percent? 80 percent? 50 percent?) is no longer eligible for return.
After all, if someone buys your e-book by accident and returns it, that sucks for you but it’s a genuine mistake on the customer’s part and is a normal cost of doing business. If a customer buys your e-book, reads a handful of pages, and decides it’s not for them—same. It stinks that you’re out that delivery fee but it’s not a scam. Buying your content, reading all the way through, and then returning for a refund is scamming. Kindle isn’t a library.
Imagine what good these BookTokers could accomplish if they turned this collective energy into pressure on public libraries to to carry self-published titles as a rule and not an exception (when there is library user demand for them).
Self-publishing is more accessible now than it’s been in the history of publishing. The costs are lower than they’ve ever been and the risk of losing money on your venture is also lower than its ever been—but it’s not nothing.
The ease of self-publishing using the KDP platform and the high royalty rate you can get make it look like a no-brainer—you’ve got a manuscript, why not put it out there? What downside could there be? And let’s be real: “Getting scammed by folks who don’t want to pay for the content they consume” should not be one of those downsides. It’s in Amazon’s power to do something about this, but you have to remember that, as the author, you are not their customer; the reader is their customer.
When you write a book, you bring a creative work into the world. When you publish a book, you open for business. As far as I am aware, there aren’t any business ventures that entail no risk.
If you have questions that you'd like to see answered in Shelf Life, ideas for topics that you'd like to explore, or feedback on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you.
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What a droll little world we live in that a scam as specific as this would arise. I have no idea what I’ll do with this newfound information, but I appreciate how you relayed it.
I do hope the self-published authors can wrench some sort of resolution from Amazon, especially given the state of traditional publishing. Then again, this world wasn’t built with writers in mind.