AI Finally Came For Me!
Today Amazon e-mailed me about the pricing of my books. I guess because I have them priced so low, they were going to start penalizing my royalties by 10% unless I raised the prices.
I logged into Kindle Direct Publishing (Amazon) to see what the situation looked like, and planned to raise the price of my “The SunnyGrrrl Colouring Book” by $2 US to align better with Amazon’s idea of inflation, but discovered that my book was no longer in the Expanded Distribution program. This meant that my book was not for sale on Amazon Canada, or anywhere else outside the US, anymore. It was only available on AmazonDotCom to Americans. I could also no longer click the button to re-enrol it in the Expanded Distribution program.
A small link on the page I was doing all of this on, went to their new Expanded Distribution program’s eligibility requirements, and it said that certain genres of books were no longer eligible, seen below:
I guess outside of the US, Amazon is disinterested in publishing any more books on these subjects as well, since they were listed directly below:
Between both lists, they listed “Adult Colouring Books” and “Colouring Books”. I got hit twice!
Baffled by this bit of information, I googled, and Gemini AI ironically told me that Kindle Direct Publishing had been flooded with AI-generated colouring books, so they had to put a cork in publishing that genre outside of Amazon USA altogether. Hmmm…that did not surprise me.
However, “The SunnyGrrrl Colouring Book” is not just a colouring book though, it’s also an art show catalogue from my 2017 art show “Poster Of A Girl”. It was all hand-drawn, by me, in pencil and ink, long before generative-AI could do anything like what it does now. Each page has accompanying text, which was the blurb beneath each original piece in the show, written by me.
So I thought I’d re-categorize it not as as colouring book, but as an art book. I was in the process of doing that when I realized: the fucking thing’s title is “The SunnyGrrrl Colouring Book“. 🤦🏼♀️
I can change all the back end categories I want, but the title for that book, with that unique ISBN barcode, is what it is and it can’t be changed. To do so, would mean unpublishing the current edition, redesigning the cover with a new title, and re-publishing it, with a new ISBN, as a new, different book, with a different title, but with the same “guts” on the inside.
But, I don’t want to do that and risk folks who already purchased the 1st Edition as a colouring book, to accidentally purchase a 2nd Edition, of the same book, with a new cover and title but no new material, thinking it’s something they don’t have or haven’t seen, and feeling duped. 🙅♀️
So that left my only other option: to only sell “The SunnyGrrrl Colouring Book” on AmazonDotCom to the US market. 😬
I can’t, in my heart, sell a book that’s not available to my mom and fellow citizens of my own country, and I especially can’t sell that book exclusively to Americans in this political climate. 🚫🇺🇸 I would rather not sell the book at all, in that case.
So, I decided to pull “The SunnyGrrrl Colouring Book” indefinitely from Amazon altogether and it is no longer available there. 🤷🏼♀️
Having said that, about a year ago, I ordered 55 copies of the colouring book that I planned to sell at physical vendor’s markets, the most I could afford to buy at the time. They’re all in a box waiting for me to get my shit together enough to do that.
Those 55 copies are now the last remaining copies to ever exist of that edition, with the pencil and ink drawings, and I’m thinking I’ll sell 45 of them in my shop, signed, until no more exist, keeping the rest for my personal archive.
Sign up for my shop mailing list at the bottom of my shop’s homepage and follow me for free on Patreon to be notified when those drop! I actually have a BIG shop update coming soon, with handmade things in limited quantities! You won’t wanna miss it!
My other book, my short story titled “LOLLAPALOOZA” about my first concert experience, is still eligible for Expanded Distribution, and is still available on Amazon worldwide, including Canada, for a very limited time.
However, Amazon made me change my price for that paperback short story today from $6 US (the lowest a book can be on Amazon) to $12 US to stay within the same royalty rate worldwide that I’ve always been in. That makes these itty bitty, 40-page books $16.49 CAD for Canadians, which is a lot for just one short story, in my opinion.
I’m not sure if $12 US translates the same way for average Americans who collect or are interested in my work as it does for Canadians, but $16.49 is like, two grande blonde vanilla lattes and a slice of lemon cake from Starbucks in Canada – and I think that’s a much better deal than my stupid story. The same story that’s also available on Kindle for $0.99 US (the lowest price it can be), if all someone wants to do is read it. 🤷🏼♀️
So, this morning when I learned about Amazon’s new royalty rate adjustments, inflation in the currency exchange rate since I first published both of my books, and AI-generated colouring books flooding and “ruining” the market there, I ordered 50 paperback copies of “LOLLAPALOOZA”, which is all I could afford. Once they arrive, I plan to pull the paperback edition of that book from Amazon completely, leaving only the $0.99 US Kindle version available there.
I’m going to sign 40 of those paperback copies of “LOLLAPALOOZA”, bundle them up nicely with my Courtney Love stickers (spoiler alert: she’s what the book is about) and put them in my SunnyGrrrl shop so people get a much cooler thing for a more reasonable price. That way I have full control over the packaging and presentation.
Plus, I actually end up with more money in my pocket for my efforts than I would have made selling those same 40 books on Amazon by themselves for what I think is an unreasonable price. I won’t get the potential volume sales Amazon is capable of, and once those books are gone, there will be no more, but considering both of my books have been available there for 4-6 years and I never did do any kind of volume outside my own hustling to drive people there, I’m honestly not bothered by it. I feel for the artists it affects more directly.
As an artist and idealist who still has a lot of faith in humanity, I’m also not personally bothered or feeling threatened by the fact that generative-AI “caused” this situation (for a million reasons I’d rather not be attacked for) and find all the layers of it more fascinating than horrifying. Maybe the world was due for another new media shake up like we had three decades ago when the World Wide Web first caught on and everything was “cyber” this and “digital” that. 🤷🏼♀️
As a muse most interested in new media – specifically the cross-section of where human creativity meets technology – I’m honestly excited to see how this all shakes out! 🍿😵💫
