For those that haven’t heard, there’s a new trend going around on TikTok where Booktokers and readers are educating each other on how to read our books for free.
How?
Abuse Amazon’s relaxed return policy and return a book that’s fully been read within the 7 day window, whether they’ve enjoyed the book or not.
Many of these readers have convinced themselves this is okay because Amazon allows it, and what’s the big deal anyway? The author can afford to lose that profit. It’s our problem, not theirs.
Sadly, it’s a lot more complicated than that. Amazon charges a delivery fee for each ebook delivered, and whether that book is returned or not, they keep that fee. Reading an entire book and then asking for your money back just because you can is as bad as downloading a free ebook from a piracy site.
Each book takes between $1000-$5000 to produce, and 98-99% of authors are considered lucky if they bring in $100 in royalties every month.
Many authors write because they love the stories, not because they are actually making money doing so. And, of course, many do it with the dream of some day making it big and doing it full time.
For many authors, losing that book profit, plus the delivery fee Amazon keeps, equals a negative total in royalties every month. This trend has caused most authors who saw between 1-3 returns a month, at most, to now see anywhere between 40-100 returns.
Amazon doesn’t allow movie returns past 48 hours, or returns for movies that have been fully watched. Thanks to the Kindle Unlimited platform, they have the means to see whether a book has been fully read or not. Which means they have the power to stop this abuse once and for all.
It’s one thing to allow readers to return fully read books, but to also keep the delivery fees of that book?
It’s putting us in an unsustainable corner.
If you could find it in your heart, please sign the Change.org petition asking Amazon to change their ebook return policy to better protect authors from this TikTok trend. It’s already gotten almost 15,000 signatures from readers like you that understand why abusing this system is unfair, and every single new signature counts.
Thank you so much for taking the time to read this post and help us out with the petition!
Sassy Redhead Book Reviews 