Tik Tok and Amazon Work to Exploit Hard Working Authors
Tik Tok and Amazon Work to Exploit Hard Working Authors
and how NFT books can save them
Thank you Lord for this day, may it be used for your glory.
Welcome to the very first Spatium Stories newsletter post.
The primary goal of this newsletter is to shine a light on current book markets, author pains, and ultimately the problems within selling, reading, and publishing books.
The secondary goal is to show how book NFTs, specifically Spatium Stories will solve these problems.
Today’s post covers a brand new trend that has recently grown in popularity on Tik Tok, and is especially harmful to authors.
Let’s jump in!
This all comes from this article:
How Tik Tok is killing authors
So this all started with that evil app called Tik Tok.
Isn’t it just fascinating what kinds of things people will do just because something is “trending” on a social media site?
I feel like Tik Tok and social media as a whole have to create some of the most fascinating case studies for psychologists.
But that’s not why we’re here.
There was this trend on Tik Tok (which has mysteriously disappeared) where people figured out you could return your ebooks on Amazon.
You read that right! Return an ebook.
I didn’t even know this feature existed. But if you accidentally purchase a book for your kindle, or purchase one and try the first page or so and hate it, you can totally return it.
That seems harmless, right? Perhaps even helpful?
Well, here is what happened.
Tik Tok got this trend going where people found a way to cheat the system.
People would buy a kindle book, read it, and then return it to get a full refund!
Essentially reading their favorite author’s books for FREE!
Win-win right?
The reader gets to read a fun book for free and the author gets all sorts of exposure! It’s awesome. The only one who gets hurt is Amazon, a 1 trillion dollar company, so who cares?
How this is actually devastating for authors
Well, those people were dead wrong.
When this trend started growing, authors from all over started ranting on Twitter, begging people not to do this. Dozens and dozens of very well-known authors did this.
But, why? What’s the problem?
See, what Tik Tokers didn’t take into account was how awful Amazon is.
Apparently the amount an author gets when a book is sold and the amount that they need to give back to Amazon when a book is returned is different.
And not in a good way.
The amount they owe back to Amazon on a book return is GREATER than what they got for the sale in the first place!
That’s right, an author can sell a book and end up owing Amazon money!
One famous author posted this tweet: “Amazon is not a library and that for every returned book, she is being charged, so now the author is indebted to Amazon.”
She was not the only one, numerous authors posted pictures showing that for a given month, even after having hundreds of books sold, they actually owed Amazon money!
That’s insane!
The same author went on to say she had been writing for over 10 years and in a given month the highest number of returns she ever saw was 2.
Now authors all over are seeing hundreds of returns and it is devastating to their careers.
That’s only the first way it hurts authors.
Second, after a lot of authors complained on Twitter, many people had the audacity to justify this Tik Tok movement. They claimed their actions were giving the author “exposure”.
This is also a bald-faced lie.
In reality, having a high number of returns hurts the reputation of the author and many booksellers will stop carrying their books because of it.
All in all, one of my favorite quotes from the article was this amazing analogy:
“People were comparing reading and returning an ebook to eating at a restaurant and asking to get the money back when the food is already gone.”
If you received the wrong food from what you ordered, it’s ok to send it back. But if you ate the entire order, you can’t just send it back anymore. That privilege is gone.
Whatever happened to reasonableness in this world?
3 Ways a book NFT platform solves this
This story is just awful. I think anyone that did this to authors doesn’t deserve to read their books anymore. It’s worse than straight-up pirating a book, which is also terrible. At least then, the author makes $0 instead of negative money.
Authors do not make great money to start with. Only the rare few do; it’s essentially just peanuts and lottery tickets out there.
So how can we solve this and make sure stuff like this doesn’t happen again?
1. Better Royalties
As much as it’s awful for someone to read and return an ebook, I think a huge problem here is Amazon.
A group of people figured out how to break Amazon’s system, and yet the author’s got hurt instead of Amazon?
That is ridiculous. This is their platform and they should be the ones hurt if someone finds a way to abuse their system.
So the first way that Spatium Stories and NFT books can help when compared to Amazon is simply fees and royalties. Amazon (for an ebook) only gives either 35% or 70% royalties (depending on a number of factors).
That’s right, they take at least 30% of your book sales, just because your book is on their site.
They do zero advertising, zero printing, and it costs them pennies to host your book.
They are a huge site and one of the only options in existence for mass selling ebooks, so for most authors it’s not the best deal, it’s the only deal.
With NFTs and smart contracts, the fees will be incredibly low and the royalties will be closer to 100%!
2. Don’t Steal from Authors
Now this article does bring up a great question for Spatium Stories and other book NFT platforms in general. Should we even have returns on NFT books? I mean, can you return a Bored Ape on OpenSea? Nope.
The fact that you have to digitally sign every purchase should be enough to prevent accidental purchases, right?
Honestly, I don’t have a clear cut answer.
If we do end up offering returns, you can bet your bottom dollar we won’t put authors in debt, though! That’s just ridiculous.
3. An Expandable and Open System
Lastly, by utilizing an open blockchain, Spatium Stories will actually act as a gateway for anyone to build on.
What do I mean by this?
This means if someone wants to create a Library app (another project we have in mind) where people can stake NFT books and earn rewards, while others rent NFT books for a small subscription, then they can do that!
If someone wants to build a fancier and better NFT book store or publishing site than ours, they can! And if they want to build a return system, they can do that too!
The beauty is that the blockchain data is totally open, so if they wanted to analyze and say person ‘X’ has purchased 15 books and returned 15 books in the past month, they could block them.
Either way, utilizing blockchain technology for NFT books will solve a lot of pain points for authors.
This is just one small example. What do you think?