Amazon and marketing your book internationally.

Yesterday, in response to this post by @alexbeyman, I tried to fetch myself a copy of Little Robot from Amazon.
I normally don't buy books from Amazon as I found it to be impossible, using the set of operating systems and tools at my disposal to get any e-book purchased from Amazon onto my e-reader. I'm from the Netherlands, and where Amazon might have been first on the e-book market in the US, allowing it to push its own non-epub e-book format that is incompatible with about every e-book reader on the market, over here, Amazon is just a small player when it comes to e-book sales. Bol has traditionally been the biggest internet online bookshop over here, and since its partnership with Kobo, the Kobo reader has become one of the most popular ones, so yes, I too have a Kobo reader, and I wouldn't trade it in for anything. Especially as the Kobo reader comes with OpenDyslexic font built in as one of the standard fonts, and this font has been a great aid in my enjoyment of reading. Not being able to get my Amazon purchased e-books onto my Kobo reader pretty much keeps me from purchasing any ebook from Amazon. I have a small set of about three e-books from Amazon right now (including the Little Robot book I just got) that are on my mobile phone, but I find the experience of reading a book on a phone quite uncomfortable, so it will be a while before I finish these books. Nevertheless, as I sympathize with what @alexbeyman is going through right now, and as I'm reading his fiction here on Steemit from my Chromebook, I got myself a copy of this book to support his work and Steemit presence, and so I can write him a 'confirmed purchase' review later on. But this is not what this blog post is about. The subject of this blog post is about what I ran into when Alex posted a link to Amazon.

The link Alex posted was a link to the '.com' site of Amazon. When I, as someone living in the EU, visited his books overview page on the '.com' site, the book page mentioned 'not available for purchase'. At first, I thought that Amazon or Alex might have put a limited distribution on the book, but this turned out not to be the case.

When I opened the Amazon App on my phone and used the search facility, I got the option to purchase the book, so everything worked out just fine. Turns out though that there isn't any universal way to share links to your books on Amazon if you want to market your e-books internationally. This might also explain why I myself hardly ever make any sales on Amazon, and why all sales I do make seem to be from EU countries.

Then I started thinking why would Amazon do such a thing. After looking a bit at different Amazon sites around the world, first directly and later with a proxy, I think I figured it out.

For my own book Ragnarok Conspiracy (available for free on as online book on Steemit), I explicitly set the lowest 70%-royalties pricepoint for each of the Amazon sites. These prices are quite a bit apart when looking at the current exchange rate. The highest minimum price point for the 70% royalties point is that of the EU where it is set at € 2.99 (about $3.46). The lowest one is that of the Brazilian Amazon site where the minimum 70% royalties price is set to just R$ 1,99 (about $0.52).

Now, when from the Netherlands or through any EU proxy I visit the '.com' Amazon site, I don't see the $2.99 price I've got set for the US, I instead see the approximate price point that I would see if I were to buy it in euros.

Here is how my book looks like through a French proxy

And this is what it looks like through a Californian proxy

Finally, this is what I get through a Brazilian proxy.

So if I wanted to cheat the pricing system buying my own book, I would just purchase all books through a Brazilian proxy and get myself an 85% discount. Amazon knows this, of cause, so what do they do? Amazon binds my account to my country and prohibits me from buying my book 'at any price' from any non-EU Amazon site.

From Amazon's point of view, this makes perfect sense, of cause. Unfortunately though, from the perspective of self-publishing authors, this creates a massive online marketing problem.

The problem might be smallest here on Steemit, where we can use a bit or markup like this:

Ragnarok Conspiracy on Amazon

US UK DE FR ES IT NL JP BR CA MX AU IN

You can't do something like that on Twitter.

For me, this all together is one more reason to dislike Amazon. But then, Amazon has never been an important channel for me compared to Kobo and iBooks. I haven't sold a single copy of Ragnarok Conspiracy on Amazon yet, and not more than a handful of copies of my previous short stories (that now come bundled with Ragnarok Conspiracy) I hope this post can help other indie authors who do have more invested in the Amazon platform like Alex can benefit a bit from this information. But I also hope that the mess Amazon makes of stuff like this will help some of you Amazon Exclusive authors to reconsider exclusivity and maybe branch out to Smashwords (that distributes to iBooks, Kobo, B&N and Bol) and Play Books