The Elephant In The Reading Room

The Elephant in the Reading Room is Amazon and its policies that hurt authors.

Patricia Bates hosted a Zoom conference on Facebook titled "Storming The Castle" which I highly recommend. Well informed authors and a lawyer from Authors Guild discuss the problem of readers who repeatedly buy, read, and then return ebooks for a full refund. 

Some would call that pretty dishonest. Perhaps the readers do not understand the difference between paying for a KU subscription in order to read KU books, and lending Amazon the price of an ebook for a week.

https://www.facebook.com/PatriciaBatesauthor/videos/1782326232158387/

One can enjoy the production without logging in to Facebook.

Kobo, Google, Barnes and Noble, and Apple are much more author-friendly in their ebook policies. By and large, they will help a reader who buys an e-book and then has difficulty accessing the pages, but they make it very difficult to return an ebook once it has been downloaded or opened.

Rightly so.  An online buyer can read several chapters of an ebook on the bookstore site before making a purchasing decision.

It is fair to be able to return an ebook that was bought by accident, which appears to be the intent with the Amazon Kindle book return policy, but it should not take seven days to discover that one has bought something accidentally.

In the seven days that Amazon allows, a reader can easily read the entire book, and still return it for a full refund.  People do that, and boast about it on TikTok, apparently.  Perhaps those people do not understand that it is the author that they are ripping off. Amazon does not pay the author when a book is borrowed and returned through the ebook sales program.

Amazon controls about 80% of all ebook sales in the USA, and therefore, in theory, 80% of all ebooks sold in America are susceptible to being read and returned.

Cheryl Davis, of Authors Guild is asking for as much data as possible to refute Amazon's claims that the problem is not great and few authors are affected. Any author who has experienced excessive returns is asked to contact staff@authorsguild.org.

She warns that businesses that claim that all calls are recorded are not keeping the recordings for the benefit of the caller.  Recordings may not be made, may not be kept, may not be retrievable. Anyone contacting Amazon about Amazon's policies or returns should be sure to put their issues into writing, and if sending an email, they should cc themselves for proof that they have made contact. 

Again, please watch, like, share this: 

https://www.facebook.com/PatriciaBatesauthor/videos/1782326232158387/

 

All the best,

Rowena Cherry 

SPACE SNARK™

http://www.spacesnark.com/  

http://www.rowenacherry.com

EPIC Award winner, Friend of ePublishing for Crazy Tuesday

Sauce For The Gander

Sauce for the gander...

In other words, “Lube for the schlong  but not so much for the cooch” (my words) is discriminatory and wrong, but it seems to approximate to the advertising policy on Facebook regarding adult products or services. The Center for Intimacy Justice cries foul.

Pleasure is verboten. So, too, are remedies for feminine maladies that Menlo Park men would rather not contemplate.

Legal blogger Jeff Greenbaum for Frankfurt Kurnit Klein andSelz PC looks into the complaint.

Here: 

https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=82782fc3-8b77-49a5-a0ae-44d6dfc25685

 

Original Link:

https://advertisinglaw.fkks.com/post/102hg5j/do-facebook-and-instagram-treat-adult-products-for-men-and-women-differently

 

Applicable to sauce with a different meaning (though, I will not get around to hooch), divorce and family law specialist and very fine blogger, Kirk C. Stange Esquire of the Stange LawFirm PC  counsels lawyers on how to get social media likes and follows.

Here:  

https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=2d26adb1-1950-4aa5-bb51-b25aff75a997

 

Original link: 

https://lawfirmpracticemanagementadvice.com/2022/01/10/how-to-get-social-media-likes-and-follows/

Kirk C. Stange's methods, rationale and advice should work just as well for authors, especially the suggestions about blatant self promotion. He looks like an interesting person to follow for any author interested in source material for divorce or family law /family court matters.

Saucy e-book pirates bite the dust in court.

Ukraine is home to the saucy  e-book pirating site KISS LIBRARY, which was sued by Amazon, PRH, and Authors Guild on behalf of 12 authors  in 2020 for pirating e-books at discounted prices  under Kissly.net, Libly.net, Cheap-Library.com, and other domain names.  The court recently awarded 7.8 million in statutory damages to the plaintiffs.

Let’s hope Ukraine makes sure that the damages are paid promptly, and that their pirate sites are shut down.

Speaking of money, January is the time to send out 1099-MISC and 1099-NEC.

https://www.usa.gov/get-tax-forms

https://www.irs.gov/instructions/i1099mec

Authors, if in the course of your business you paid your webmaster or webmistress (whom I suppose the new, Microsoft Officious app may now suggest we now call webexpert and weblover ) $600 or more, you need to fill out a 1099-NEC.  Copy A must go to the IRS with a filing form 1096. Copy B must go to the webexpert or weblover.

Ditto if you paid a lawyer.

Incorporated businesses usually do not need 1099-NECs. PCs, LLCs, and individuals do.

This $600 threshold is probably why the IRS is now empowered to look at bank accounts, so it is probably more important than ever before to send out these forms and fill them out correctly.

Original forms are free from the IRS, and also from some public libraries.  If you have fewer than 10 forms, and do not own a typewriter or file-online account, you may use handwriting as long as you remember to use block printing, in black ink, and do not run over the outlines of the boxes on the forms.

All the best,

Rowena Cherry 

SPACE SNARK™ 

http://www.spacesnark.com/ 

EPIC Award winner, Friend of ePublishing for Crazy Tuesday