Dear Amazon,

Happy Independence Day. To celebrate, I’m taking my first steps away from you. My first book to make the parting of the ways official is Saturday Love, which is the first of my books to come free of the Kindle Select program.

I’m looking at other ways to make Saturday Love available across other platforms now. Soon it will be available in iBooks, on Nook, and probably in many other formats. I’ll be sure to let you know when that happens as I’m sure you’ll want to celebrate with me.

In the meantime, since Saturday Love can no longer be borrowed for free by your Amazon Prime customers, I’ve cut the price to 99 cents. True, this means I get less than 35 cents per ebook purchased, but I’d rather get nothing than participate in a program that abuses authors. At least this way I get to be my own pimp.

I’ve had people ask me why I’m so outspoken about this. After all, I’m a librarian. If a library bought my book and loaned it out for free, I wouldn’t get anything at all from the people who borrowed it, regardless of how much or how little they read. True, but the library would have bought the book. You didn’t do that. You never bought my books, but you’re getting money from the Prime customers who borrow them. I know that because I am a Prime customer, and I paid for that membership. I also don’t borrow books. I buy them. Even Kindle editions. So it won’t hurt me too much to switch to Nook for my ebooks.

I don’t doubt that my stance against you is rather like a little mouse waving a pin-sized sword at an elephant. My hope is to be joined by other authors waving pin-sized swords (or pens) at you. For the time being, I’ll keep jabbing with my itty-bitty pen, and working toward true independence.

Signed,

One of your authors

P.S. Here’s a link to buy Saturday Love for just 99 cents: