Amazon started business as an online bookstore and grew from there. He wanted to give the burgeoning ebook market a place to find readers, and vice versa. Since he's gone into selling everything including the kitchen sink, it's been about the money and screw the authors. And publishers.

We launched out online site in 2000 and broadened the scope to commercial fiction in 2011. By 2013, we were making five figures a month in sales and publishing 2 books a week, all year except for Xmas week. By the time KU launched, our sales quickly tanked, and by 2017, our sales were barely 10% of what they had been in the beginning. The pandemic made it worse.

We had some trouble with Amazon summer before last and it took three months to sort it out because getting a real person on the line/email, was almost impossible. Of course, during that time, Amazon kept every royalty we made for those 90 days.

Not long after, stories were being released of Bezos' new super yacht being made in Rotterdam and how they were going to have to destroy a historic bridge to get the behemoth out of the shipyard... That's what money will get you.

It has not been a good ride with that company. I hear many similar stories from authors and other publishing houses we've befriended over the years. Sadly, it's a necessary evil...