OK, I’m going to call it: the days of the old indie author model are over.
The days of selling purely on Amazon are over.
It used to be that you could put up a book, choose KU or wide, advertise a bit and work your way up.
That model has been dying for a while, but it’s dead.
It’s not about the Amazon ban, or about how bad economics (or tbh for many people simply being afraid they might be kicked out of their fucking job), although it is also about those things.
By my estimate, the world reached peak Amazon some time during the pandemic. The world reached peak Facebook a few years before that.
You know what empires at the top of the ladder do, right?
They eat their own.
In their insatiable thirst for expansion, they fail to locate a second planet with another 8 billion suckers to get into their influence, so they start to eat their own.
You know who’s on the entree menu, right? Their merchants, their content providers. Because we are more desperate and have a far worse cash flow than they.
They charge us for ads. They make ads a necessity. They work great for some people. Those people become gurus and sell courses, bringing in more people to milk for ads… and then they screw up ad costs and screw down their efficiency.
Done. Done. Tick.
You cannot sell much on Amazon without ads. You can spend a fortune on ads and still not sell much. Reader lists that used to be effective (think Bookbub) have lost their power. Other retailers have their own agendas that don’t align with ours.
Seeing that this model is dead for most authors doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t take part in it.
(However, never spend more than you earn on ads)
But it will absolutely cease to be the only model sustaining most fulltime writers. Here is my take:
We’re heading towards a situation where the vast majority of career writers will *have* to sell independently (through their website or store providers) to survive. Selling direct requires an audience that successful writers will *have* to cultivate and maintain themselves. Few can rely on retailers doing this for them anymore.
As authors:
We need to own the shop
We need to own the list
We need to own the promotion opportunities
As aside, the Ebookaroo newsletter went out yesterday. That’s my part in helping with this endeavour.
