We got an unexpected email from Amazon last week that has us in a flap. To understand what’s happening, and why it is an injustice, you need to understand how Amazon works and what they’re about to do.
Amazon is our chosen print partner for our softcover notebooks and colouring books because, of all the possible print partners out there, they allow us to charge the least for our books without compromising on quality. And ultimately, we want you to be able to afford to buy them or what’s the point?
We were really happy with the prices we were charging because to our minds, our notebooks and colouring books were really affordable for most people across the world. But that’s about to change.
What’s happening behind the scenes with Amazon is the single biggest change to happen to their print-on-demand model since they began. They have declared that for any book priced under US$9.99, they are decreasing our royalties from 60% to 50%. And that doesn’t sound like a lot until you realise that not all is as it seems. Once you understand what Amazon actually means by 60%, and the real reason they’re bringing in this change, then you’ll understand the injustice of it. And you’ll understand just how greedy Amazon was already being.
We get 60% of royalties, but out of OUR royalties, WE have to pay the printing cost. So for a softcover notebook, if it was say, $10.00 on Amazon, and it cost $4.00 to print, we’d get $6.00 minus $4.00. A total of $2.00 per sale. Amazon make $4.00 per sale. Twice as much as we do. And you can be sure that Amazon make a cut on the printing cost as well. So essentially they are double-dipping and taking more than their fair share.
It would be nice to say we made $2.00 or more per book, but we make a whole lot less than that. And now that Amazon is chopping down our share to 50% minus the printing fees, for all of our softcover notebooks, we are literally in negative profits! We would owe Amazon money. For the Australian market, we make a whopping AU$0.79 cents per book. That’s it. And now, with the new pricing model, we will be in the negatives. We lose that 79 cents entirely and then some. Who can afford to lose the 79 cents? Amazon or us? Not us, that’s for sure.
Our colouring books, with the new changes, will sit just over the profit margin, and so we may need to raise the price for those too, but we are thinking about that. The 10% decrease in royalties more than halves our profits. We will be lucky to make US$0.70 cents per sale! It is a huge whack of money for so many creators, not just us. Many incomes are about to more than halve. And it is made worse by the fact that with Amazon’s pricing model, little increases like US$1.00 a book, barely gain us anything, but for markets like the Australian one, with GST added, etc, the cost goes up enormously. Several dollars in fact. But we have to do it or we are in the negatives.
Amazon claims it is due to the “difficulty” of production costs for books priced under $9.99, but they must think we’re stupid because firstly, WE pay the production costs, not Amazon, and that includes giving Amazon profits for just that alone. (When we buy our books at cost as author copies, you can be sure Amazon is still making a profit.) And secondly, the cost of production for a book doesn’t change depending on what we charge. A 120-page 6×9 softcover notebook costs Amazon the same amount to print whether we charge $7 for it or $17. AND THAT COST IS COVERED BY US!!
The real reason is obvious to everyone involved. Amazon is killing off low-cost publishing and low-content books. That’s ultimately what they’re trying to do. And that’s ultimately what will happen.
Amazon are trying to rid their site of people who flood it with minimum viable products and charge the smallest amount they can. Think AI colouring books and the most basic notebooks with a thousand different boring, public-domain-art covers all uploaded by their hundreds. They are forcing content producers to add value to their products by making us all raise our prices to higher than a customer comfortably wants to pay and higher than we comfortably want to charge. A customer will pay it if they think there’s value, but what if you just want, say, a basic lined notebook? Now you have to pay far too much for one. What you’ll do then is go to someone who mass prints and produces them, not to an independent publisher like us.
It hurts those of us who produce paperback notebooks, and it hurts customers, and it hurts children’s picture book authors, people who produce non-fiction books, children’s novel authors, it ends the novella industry, and definitely hurts those who create puzzle books and paperback colouring books etc. (Most colouring books on Amazon are priced at $7.99.)
As lovely as our paperback notebooks are, if we up them to $9.99 USD, then they end up being about AU$18, and that’s far more than we’d want anyone to pay. And that goes for our colouring books as well. So in one single move, Amazon has killed a lot of LEGITIMATE books and hurt a lot of LEGITIMATE producers, writers, creators, artists etc.
Welcome to the world of online printing, where the distributors and the powerful like Amazon call the shots. We have had to dance to their tune of power and control many times, and it isn’t fun.
If you were considering one of our softcover notebooks, or even a colouring book, now is the time to grab one before the price goes up by June 10th.*
And a tip: Most books under 9.99 US, 7.99 GBP or 13.99 AU, printed by Amazon, are about to go up as well by June 10th. That includes notebooks, puzzle books, a myriad of colouring books, children’s picture books, novels and non-fiction books. So grab some others while you can.
*June 10th is our deadline, but we will need to change the prices before then to ensure they are approved by the system in time.
About the Author: Lisa Saul
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