Amazon: Why am I even trying?

While other indie authors all seem to have Amazon as their primary channel, for me Amazon has repeatedly turned out to be a massive time sink that has given me zero returns. When my two short stories were still paid e-books, on Amazon they both made close to zero sales, and the sales they did make got me one review worse than the worst review on any of the other channels.

Later, after the revenues of my short stories surpassed my editing and cover art costs, I decided to make my stories free, or so I tried. On all Smashwords supported channels (apart from Bol), making the story free was as simple as it can be. Set the prize to zero and channels like iBooks, Kobo, B&N follow quickly.

But then Amazon. Amazon used to do prize matching, but there was a catch. Every Amazon site, on a per country or per region basis had its own price matching. It won't ever do automated price matching. You need to report a cheaper point of sales and that point of sales need to be for the same region using the same currency or something like that. So after many days of messing with proxies and many weeks waiting, my books that were free on the other channels were starting to be free on at least a subset of the Amazon websites. But then, prize matching stopped and however much I tried I haven't been able to get any prize matching to FREE ever again. Massive amounts of time spent on Amazon and all for just a hand full of downloads.

At this moment as many of you might know, I'm trying to wrap up things for my final draft for my first full novel Ragnarok Conspiracy, making some last self-edits after having processed the amazing feedback from my beta reading competitions.

Then an idea came to me. If Amazon doesn't do prize matching, why not bundle my short stories with my novel for Amazon? No more messing with trying to get Amazon to prize match. So I asked the talented Keith Draws if he could create a cover for that using the art from the three covers he did for me earlier. And this is what he made me:

I know I'm biased here, but I think he did an amazing job. So once my draft stops being a draft, I'm giving Amazon one final try. And as I never published my short stories on Play before, I think I'll go for the bundled stories on Play as well. Oh, and then there is Bol. Not sure yet if I want my novel completely free on iBooks, Kobo and other Smashwords channels, but as making it free will make it unavailable on Bol, I'm seriously considering going for a bundled version on all channels first, using this cover art everywhere. If later I decide to want to make a free version again, I'll just use the original cover for the free version.

If Amazon fails again as a channel (what to be fair I expect it to, but you'll never know), at least I will have tried. If it doesn't, just the fact that the idea of supporting it again got me this absolutely amazing cover, makes me think even failure. So, while I was planning to only use this cover for Amazon, I'm now going to makr the bundled short stories version my first one to release on all channels (Amazon, Play, and all of the the Smashwords supported channels).

Still have some weeks, maybe months to go before everything is fully polished and ready to push to all output channels, but I'm really happy about where things are going now.