So I try not to check my sales on Amazon too often. It’s very easy to get caught up in either the dopamine rush of YAY! I SOLD SOME BOOKS!—for which I am very grateful, but let’s face it, if I indulge in dopamine rushes too often that takes away time from me writing more books to sell—or despairing over not having sold enough books, where “enough” is a completely arbitrary number made up by my ego. We authors, we’re a fragile lot.
But I do check it from time to time, and as I was tracking the numbers for Sparks Fly I noticed that for every four or five books sold I was getting one return. A couple returns is probably the nature of the game: people mouse-click, people impulse-buy and then regret, and so on. But as the returns increased I started to worry. I’m still new at this, after all; maybe I hadn’t written my book description just right and readers were feeling deceived. Maybe I’d implied the book was steamier than it was. Or less steamy than it was. (For the record, if your complaint about Sparks Fly was that the book wasn’t steamy enough, the next book may be more to your liking. Just you wait…) And of course, Amazon doesn’t say why a book was returned; I can only speculate.
After a few rounds of internal questioning (we authors, we’re a fragile lot), I finally went online searching for advice on what increasing numbers of returns meant. And instead of being told to think harder about my cover or my book description, I got reports that authors are complaining about readers abusing Amazon’s return policy. Amazon will allow you to demand a refund on an ebook up to 14 days after you purchase it, which is not matched by Kobo or iBooks or any of the other major ebook retailers. So the possibility exists that some of those returns were from people who bought the book, read it within 14 days, and then returned it, as if Amazon were a library. The problem for me is that Amazon is not a library, and when you return the book it takes back from me the royalties it paid out on the initial purchase.
(Authors do get money from readers checking out books from actual libraries, by the way. Basically libraries can pay the publisher to license a copy of the ebook; it varies from publisher to publisher how much that license costs and how many ebook copies it covers. Eight of Pentacles Publishing is currently working on getting my books into libraries.)
I’m glad that authors are speaking up, but… to tell you the truth, my readers, I don’t feel like getting particularly mad at you, my readers, even if you are reading and returning. Because, again, I don’t know why you’re reading and returning. Maybe a cash crunch came up after you bought it and the $4.99 went towards something you or someone in your family needed. Maybe you were fully on board until Chapter 23 and then a writing choice I made angered you. Maybe it’s a pricing issue: you would have been okay with $2.99 but $4.99 feels like too much. (Or maybe, as the NPR article implies, you were influenced by TikTok. In which case: don’t use TikTok! TikTok spies on you and is generally terrible! Worse than Facebook!) And without knowing I feel like I have some obligation to give you the benefit of the doubt.
All the same: I do put hard work into these books and deserve to get paid for it. So if you did read and enjoy and return Sparks Fly, I do request that you avoid doing the same with future books whenever you can. I’ll be running sales as new books come out, so if it’s a cash-flow issue, join my mailing list and be on the lookout for sale announcements. And if it was a different issue that caused you to return, you can always let me know directly.