I love writing books. I love sharing them with the world and receiving reviews and messages from people who have spent hours enjoying what comes out of my head. I’ve been doing it seriously for almost 2 years now and have learned so much in that time.
I thought I would finally be a full time writer this August. That was until amazon decided to start taking money from authors without proof or data. With only so much as ‘we see suspicious activity but that is all we can tell you.’ They can’t tell us what happened or how it happened. They can’t tell us how to prevent it. But just like clockwork, 10 days into the next month they adjust our payout. After we have spent a month funneling money into their ads based on the data they reported to us. So not only do they get the $1500 they cut from my earnings, they get the $800+ that I spent on their ads based on false reporting.
It’s not right and it’s not good business. If you can’t control people manipulating your system, which I’m not entirely sure occurred on my account based on my historical data, then you shouldn’t report earnings in real time. And you definitely shouldn’t adjust earnings the month after.
I don’t know what I’m going to do. Amazon is such a big piece of the pie that it would hurt my income to quit being exclusive. But I might just have to suck it up and put my books on other platforms.