This is something I probably should have done three weeks ago when I removed my books from Amazon – I suppose it’s better a little late than never…
I had all five of my books available from Amazon in both digital and paperback versions from 2013. I have not earned more than about three-hundred-dollars in royalties since then, even though I advertized my books through their site and on my social networking platforms up until 2018. (Poor sales for the products of ordinary folks/small businesses on Amazon is common, as I have recently discovered.) The only time I earned any real money for my work was when I was able to buy paperback copies at a discounted price that I then sold myself. They ended this publishing/selling option several years ago for authors outside of North America.
I have been scanning the web in order to make sure that they do not continue to sell my products. It seems that the digital versions have been removed but two of my most popular paperback versions are still available. My autobiography is selling at $39.80 when I was selling it for about $25.00 (see it here). My practical guidebook on how to deal with the symptoms of PTSD – which is only fifty-two-pages-long – is selling for $140.00 and apparently it is a used copy (see it here). It was formerly priced at around $15.00. (They may remove these links when this post is published. Some of my searches on other search engines, such as DuckDuckGo, show that the products are listed as “currently unavailable”: it’s all very shifty, is it not?)
Avoid being scammed into buying any of my products from them. I am also doing a check on their affiliates and so far, I have seen that my books have been removed from their sites, or listed as “currently unavailable”. If you come across any of my books being sold via other book sellers, please let me know. People selling second-hand copies on eBay, is OK.
It is a scam but what else would you expect from the evil ones behind the internet, conglomerates, banks, and so on? (Please do not bother giving me examples of people who do well on Amazon because the only ones allowed to truly advance there, or anywhere else in the world, are members of a certain Tribe that I have outed here. Most of them are crypto-members of the Tribe – they hide in plain sight – so you would never know unless you dug deeper into their backgrounds.)
They still owe me royalties – three weeks is not enough time to receive the funds, so I will wait and see what happens. If I am not paid by the end of the year, they have no intention of paying me. I suspect that they have been doing one of two things since 2013: 1/ selling my books surreptitiously in ways that I would never be able to prove, thus depriving me of the true amount of money that I have earned through my God-given creativity, or, 2/ making my books less visible – even when I advertize them – via their algorithms. I do not recommend that you place your products on Amazon – you are better off doing it through your own website, physical place of business, etc.
I am currently in the process of rewriting all of my books. When I am ready, they will only be available from my website and shopfront (if I find some place that I can afford). For anyone interested in the Tutorial course, you may currently purchase the relevant books as PDF documents from me directly. The only payment method available is a direct transfer of the funds into my bank account (that will be the only way to pay me in future, too, unless you want to pay in cash, at which point you will need to interact with me in the real world).
As I stated in a recent article, it is time to create a whole new world where we rely more on one another, instead of the cheats and thieves in control of the planet.
Helen
