I thought about using it and filled everything out. Then I got to the payment screen. Amazon wanted to charge me for the two books I was going to give away (which is fine) but then they also wanted to charge me $6 shipping on each book, which was the price of the book, BTW. My first thought is: WTF?! I'm an Amazon Prime member, why do I have to pay for shipping? They've anticipated that with a button that says, "Why can't I use my Amazon Prime?" The answer is basically: Cuz we said so. You can't use Amazon Prime for giveaways. Which is pretty fucking lame. I mean I'm already buying the books from them why do I have to pay twice as much to ship them?
So Goodreads is still the better alternative. Or just using Rafflecopter or one of those things to do the giveaway yourself. Then I can just order the books from Amazon and use Prime to ship them for free. So suck it Amazon.
It just seems to me another way of Amazon disrespecting independent sellers on its site. I read an article the other day about how starting this fall they're going to kick their already loose return policies up a notch to make it even easier for scumbags to defraud sellers, as happened to me when I tried to sell a laptop on Amazon. I just get really tired of dealing with their crap; if there were another way I'd take it in a heartbeat.
Speaking of giveaways, you can enter a Goodreads giveaway to win 1 of 2 copies of the Eric Filler gender swap novella The Comeback. It's probably the closest to literary fiction I've written in a few years. An 80s hair rocker who has since become a has-been gets drunk and falls off a stage while playing the Corn Festival in Auburn, Michigan (which is based on a real thing) and wakes up in a "rehab" facility as a teenage girl. His manager then signs him up for an American Idol-type show and he begins a new career as a pop princess while also getting his heart broken a few times. It's out in paperback now and in a couple of weeks in Kindle. If you want, be like most people and enter to win it and then never bother reading or reviewing it!
3 comments:
Lately, Amazon has come across as "We don't care about you the seller. We're this big monster that you need, so deal with it." So over the years, I've often bought things on Amazon, especially a lot of my Christmas shopping. All I can say is...Not any more. I've been spreading out where I buy things these days.
It's unbelievably hard to sell books these days and I admire anyone trying to do so.
For a book company they're surprisingly poor at supporting authors. It seems asinine to charge you to run a giveaway. We've used Rafflecopter a bunch of times and it's by far the easiest sweepstakes out there. Suck it indeed.
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