March 6, 2025, 1:53pm
Folks, the time has come to stop linking to Amazon. For good.
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If you’re reading this site, you likely already knew this in your heart. And I’m actually not here to give you the litany of reasons why Amazon’s extractive capitalism, aggressive union-busting, take-no-prisoners monopolization of not just books but basically all commerce, and Jeff Bezos’s insistence on using his ill-gotten gains to support the fascist takeover of the country are bad. The odds are, again, that you know this. And I do understand that none of us are perfect, that all of us are susceptible to the siren song of convenience and a good deal. That’s not going to be solved for until we solve for a whole bunch of other things, and it’s beyond any of us to do individually.
But there is something that we, the book industry, can do—and it’s something that would actually strike a small but meaningful blow at the behemoth! And that’s to stop linking to your book on Amazon.
It is maddening to see writers who are otherwise full-throated in their support of progressive ideals scurrying to promote every time their book is sold for a penny or a dollar or whatever during an Amazon ‘deal’ day. It’s infuriating to see publishers and authors alike putting together a list of links for where to buy a book with Amazon at the top of the list, even as they include Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, or a direct link to a local indie bookstore. And I tell you what: there is NO REASON to do it. Stop doing it! Stop linking to your book on Amazon!
Of course, there is a reason that people will continue to do it: money. Even the most high-minded excuse—that you want more people to read your book—really just means that you want to sell more copies of your book. If you really wanted more people to read your book, you’d give it away! Except we have come to believe, thanks to relentless oligarchic conditioning, that free must mean low-quality or bad or somehow less than anything that you’d pay for… and so what you actually want is for people to pay for your book, because paying for your book tells publishers and the industry at large that you are worth giving money in the future, for your next project. And believe me, I get it, I really do. I want a book deal! I want to sell a bajillion copies of my work, or at least a few hundred of each book I hopefully someday get to publish, in the hopes that I can keep doing it forever.
But guess fucking what? It isn’t a right to get to share your book, it does not (and by extension nor do you) deserve to be read, and it isn’t even existential that you should be able to ‘make money’ off of your art! It’s a privilege—all of it is a privilege.
Yes, Amazon allows for an ostensible democratization of the landscape—and I know, for certain, that I’m going to get an earful from the self-publishing brigade, who will ride in to tell me that they need Amazon because that’s where they can sell their books, that’s how they can make any money at all, that’s how they can get their work published outside of the gatekeeping that is the traditional publishing industry. And you know what, they might be right! Publishing is still far too cloistered, too careful, too white—but giving a cut of your profit to an evil billionaire just so you can see your book in the world is not the flex that you think it is. Put your book on AO3 if you want people to read it so bad, or make a store on your website and print your book through IngramSpark if it’s so important that you have hard copies.
I do want to be clear: I get that it feels like there is a sacrifice, removing the link from your website. You will, almost certainly, sell fewer copies of your book this way. And that’s going to turn a lot of you off from this idea. I know that authors I admire are going to end up posting about the next time their book is a Kindle Daily Deal or whatever, because they’ve been told they have to post about it by their publicists or their agents or their friends or their deep desire to be seen and known and dear god won’t someone buy my book please?!
But I bet it won’t be as bad as you think. I bet that people will still buy your book through one of the maaaaaany other online retailers or via their local indie bookstore. And maybe, just maybe, that can be enough. We’re never going back to the way that things were (or even, dare I say, the way they are now)—so why not make a break? The best time to do it was yesterday, but the second-best time is right now. Show yourself and others how easy it is to say, “oh, maybe money isn’t the most important thing” and you’ll be surprised at what might come out of that.
Or at the very least, we can all stop giving Jeff Bezos quite so much of our everything.
