Amazon’s monopolistic tendencies are pretty worrisome these days. It’s quickly risen from just another website to something much too big to rein in. You can’t compete with it, and the government struggles to regulate it. 

There’s lots of the usual reasons to hate them. They don’t pay their share of taxes and miscategorize employees as contractors to avoid paying benefits. They break unions and mistreat employees. Their injury rates are astronomical. Their drivers are tracked so precisely they can’t take a bathroom break. But it’s easy to say, well, businesses are awful, we know that, but there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism anyway, and we do have to buy things sometimes.

But the sheer size of it causes problems on a scale other retailers can’t match. If a Barnes & Noble moves into town, they pay taxes to the town. When Amazon wants to build a warehouse, they cut special deals with cities to avoid paying their fair share—because they’re such a large employer, localities can’t afford to turn them away. If Amazon gets fined for worker violations, they can easily afford to simply pay the fine while changing nothing. Most of the internet is hosted by them now. If they want to do something, they simply do it. They have the power to.

The latest news is that Alexa, which formerly promised to keep your voice data local, is now uploading it all to the cloud. You can’t opt out. They are altering the deal.

It’s the monopoly game, and nobody has ever won it the way Amazon is winning it. Years of the US government failing to enforce antitrust laws resulted in companies bigger than governments. They can now buy elections. The seven top political donors in the US contributed almost a billion dollars to Republicans in 2024, overshadowing any other donors. So who will Republicans be beholden to? The companies that purchased them. I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that a few monopolies deserve much of the blame for the current rise of fascism.

How the monopoly strategy works

If you’ve got enough money to start with, there’s a winning strategy for developing a monopoly, used by Uber, AirBnB, and other startups around the country. It goes like this. You develop a product and a model that delivers it cheaply. You flood the market with your new thing, undercutting all your competitors. You lose money for quite a while, hoping you can afford to do it longer than your competitors can. Once they’re out of business and you have no viable competition, you can hike the prices as high as you want.

This is going on all around us, all the time. Why are we paying so much for eggs? There’s a monopoly on eggs. Why are we paying so much for groceries? Each town has two or three chains and they’re all hiking their prices together. The fewer companies in the market, the more they can control prices. We think it’s inflation, but it’s not: it’s a choice monopolies make as soon as they have the ability to make it.

An oligopoly in publishing (the Big Five) is why it’s harder and harder to get a book deal with fewer and fewer imprints, and the advances are getting smaller and smaller. Deals get worse in other ways, too, like authors having to pay their own marketing and accept their advances in smaller chunks delivered later.

The Justice Department called this a “monopsony.” While a monopoly means you are the only seller in a market, a monopsony means you are the only buyer. So suppliers—authors, in the case of books—are the ones who suffer. We are forced to accept increasingly raw deals because they are the only game in town.

Self publishing is a way to get around that monopsony. We own the means of production, our own words. We can go directly to customers and get a fair price for our work.

At least…in theory. 

How Amazon has us over a barrel

The thing is, we still don’t distribute our own books, generally; it’s impractical to do in most cases. A few online bookstores do it for us: Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Smashwords, etc.

But Amazon is the whale of the market. Almost all indie authors find the vast majority of their sales come through Amazon. And few authors mind this: Amazon gives a good royalty, in many cases the best royalty you can get. When you’re selling 90% of your copies through Amazon, you start to wonder, why sell it anywhere else?

And Amazon, for its part, deeply wants you to make that choice. They offer special perks if you’re exclusive with them, most notably inclusion in the Kindle Unlimited catalogue. They lose money on KU, as I’m constantly being reminded. It’s a “loss leader.” That means they are willing to lose money on it in order to undercut everyone else in the market, become the only place both readers and authors will go to find each other. And they can afford to lose money on any given part of the business for as long as it takes to acquire a monopoly, by funding it with the profits from elsewhere in their massive empire.

They’re training readers that you don’t buy books, you pay Amazon and read all you want. And they’re training authors not to bother putting their books up anywhere else, since some of the most prolific readers use KU and at this point will never buy a book again, not when they have more than they could ever read for the cost of their membership.

The payments you get for page reads in KU vary, based on how many subscribers they have vs. how many books in the catalog. Most notably, it shrinks every once in a while. So far as I know, getting a book read in KU will nearly always net you less than selling a copy. But hey—you don’t know if they would have bought a copy anyway. Probably not, now that their whole book budget is KU. And now they can try your book out for free. Lots of reviewers try dozens of books in a month, just a taste, to see if they like them, and they’re certainly not going to pay for a copy of each.

It’s become an impossible situation for authors. Publish your book wide—that is, in all the different stores—and you still sell most through Amazon. Go exclusive with KU, and you get into the KU catalog and get this bonus source of income plus a lot of visibility…but you’re helping Amazon do its monopolistic, market-absorbing strategy. We can expect to see a lot of other self-publishing outlets stop bothering, even though what they provide costs them virtually nothing, because nobody is using them.

What we can do

The worst part of this, in my opinion, is the way an attempted Amazon boycott was immediately met with loud outcries from the indie book community. “Don’t cancel KU, it’s a major source of income!” “Don’t boycott Amazon, we’re not anywhere else!” So the smallest attempt to diversify from Amazon at all resulted in genuine harm to indie authors, and then mobilized them as an anti-boycott lobby. Amazon doesn’t have to say a word to get the point across: keep buying into our monopolistic system, or your beloved indie authors get it in the shorts.

My books are wide, that is, they’re everywhere. Sometimes I’m asked if my books are in KU, and when I say no, the reader or reviewer loses interest. So that stings. I do point out that they are in Kobo+, which is a subscription model cheaper than KU, and in Hoopla, which is a per-page-read model used by many libraries. But that doesn’t always help. Not all libraries use Hoopla (for complicated reasons, it can be a bad deal for them) and most people don’t want to subscribe to both KU and Kobo+. They want to pick one, and KU has by far the larger catalog. Just like authors have to pick one, and KU has by far more readers. 

You see? It’s a catch-22. None of us exactly wants to be on Amazon, but it’s the only way we know how to find each other, and it’s hard to coordinate a move from one platform to another. We all saw that when Twitter started going south. We all wanted to move from Twitter to someplace else, but we weren’t all going the same places, and some people didn’t want to go, and others didn’t want to go anywhere that wasn’t already full of interesting people. In the end we scattered. There isn’t a place like Twitter was, including what Twitter turned into.

But moving over from Amazon should be at least a little easier, because other than Amazon, no other retailer demands exclusivity. So you can be everywhere but KU, making yourself available for everyone. You can be in Kobo+ while also selling books in countries around the world, to libraries, and so on. I’m seeing more and more people also publishing on itch.io. Another option is BookFunnel, which just hosts download links if you have the checkout somewhere else—meaning you take essentially the whole profit.

There are almost infinite ways to sell an ebook, so that’s not the issue. The issue is customers being willing to buy somewhere other than Amazon. I really feel that if more customers check for an off-Amazon link first, it’ll encourage authors who are wide to stay wide. It’ll also help keep alternative stores in business.

Findability is another problem. I’d like to see more book review sites besides Goodreads (which is owned by Amazon), and for more people to share universal book links instead of Amazon links. Unfortunately, many of Amazon’s competitors don’t have a good algorithm or even search function. We end up having to find the books elsewhere and then go to the storefront to find them.

Is it worth the trouble? After all, we’re not taking down Amazon with a boycott; it’s just too big.

I think we need to realize that stopping monopoly doesn’t require taking down the biggest business. Instead, we only need to keep alive all the other options. As long as Amazon still has competitors, it has to keep offering the sweet deals or else lose business. It’s only when the competitors are gone (or effectively gone) that they can start altering the deal, like when they took away privacy from the Alexa or put ads in Prime Video.

Now, are the competitors to Amazon in the book field any better to work with? Honestly, not really! It’s a smaller part of a smaller business, so they may not give you a better experience at all. (Though at least in most of them, there is a human behind customer service still.) The royalties may be a couple of cents less.

But you’ll have one distinct advantage: one store can’t suddenly decide you’re breaking the TOS and take your book down, making it unavailable anywhere. That does happen sometimes with Amazon, and you’ll have to fight with them to prove you weren’t in violation.

In my opinion, the best way to go wide is through Draft2Digital. They are a distributor that will get your ebook in all the ebook stores out there, so that you only have to put up your file once. At times, it can be worth the trouble to upload to stores individually to get in on the various deals and promotions they have, but I am not a big enough self-publisher for it to be worth learning how to use them all.

Kobo is also very worth it, in my opinion. I thought they were owned by Walmart, but it turns out they aren’t. They were affiliated with them at one time and now are not. So it’s a good anti-monopoly choice. I have one of their readers and I find it easy to add epubs from anywhere. It also integrates with Overdrive, which is nice. If you’re looking for an Amazon-like experience—e-reader integrated with e-store, subscription based unlimited reading—that’s who I’d go with as a reader.

I’m still on Amazon. I don’t especially want to be, but I’m also realistic. Hardly anybody is buying it anywhere else, and not many readers love me enough to actually look for my books elsewhere. But I don’t want to be exclusive with Amazon, regardless what I lose from it. It’s going to hurt us all in the end if we get too deeply entrenched in it.

But that’s just my two cents. Well, twenty, after inflation, monopolistic price-hiking, and our dystopian late capitalist economy.

Where do you fall on this issue? I don’t believe in tearing each other apart over it; I understand authors have to do what they must for their business. But I do believe in doing what I can to move away from getting ensnared in Amazon’s monopoly.