As Darkstream viewers know, I think rather highly of the marketing book In Search of Stupidity. I’ve read the 2nd edition twice – I borrowed the paperback from Farley at his recommendation – and after discovering that an updated 3rd edition had been released, I went and picked up a copy. I’m about halfway through it, and you can probably understand I was a little startled by the following passage from the chapter on Amazon and its war with the Big Five publishers.
Another problem with Karnivorous is that it seems he has a distinct political bias. In March 2018, members of the Conservative Libertarian Fiction Alliance (CLFA) began reporting that many of their book reviews were disappearing from Amazon; in some cases, all reviews were pulled down. As always, Amazon refused to say why. Progressive and liberal authors writing on topics similar to the conservatives and libertarians did not have their reviews purged. The CFLA begin to push back publicly, and some authors such as sci-fi author Jon Del Arroz had their reviews restored. Arroz had his own theory on what had happened:
“I believe the CLFA was targeted by an extreme alt-left troll mob running an email harassment campaign to Amazon who were enabled by a rogue Amazon employee.”
This was not paranoia on Arroz’s part. In 2017, an Amazon employee had temporarily succeeded in having a book released by conservative publisher Castalia House kicked off Kindle until their behavior was uncovered.
As readers here will recall, the SJWs in the KDP department behaved even more egregoiusly in 2019. While their customer service first told a bunch of lies, the KDP department’s actions were subsequently determined to have been based on “incorrect” information and Castalia’s account was quickly reinstated. While we did manage to get everything sorted out in only 18 hours, the incident served to confirm the importance of the strategic shift we had already begun. Now we’re moving off of Audible in favor of the Arkhaven store and it may not be long before we abandon KDP as well.