The hard part: Amazon’s affiliate bounty for me linking to my own book is comparable to my own publisher royalty.

Here comes a short thread on the costs of ethics and how I’m trying to navigate all of this. https://twitter.com/HelenMcClory/status/1334469581436555265

I can get into the nitty gritty of how I can have a really good on-paper royalty rate but see in practice a single digit percentage of the cover price on the eventual cheque. It’s all on the up-and-up. I’ll dive into it if someone wants but it’s dull. Don’t make me talk about it.

So for the Effin’ Birds book’s first year I did my best to avoid linking to Amazon. When people asked I’d give them a direct link, and I ran a couple of ads when they had the book on really cheaply, but mostly I talked up local shops and linked to Bookshop for online sales.

In the end, 70% of my sales came from Amazon anyways.

I don’t want to call my efforts useless, but it’s hard to look at that number and feel like I moved the needle.

The painful part is that because I didn’t do affiliate linking, I missed out on an extra 4.5% of the cover price of those sales. Even at the top end of my contract, with all the milestones met, with no one else taking a cut, I’m getting maybe 10% of the cover price as a royalty.

And a lot of those sales were at a lower rate and with some other splits. A good portion of them I functionally received 5% of cover, so that 4.5% bonus is a lot.

When Bookshop launched it seemed like the ideal answer, and I made an account and linked to it for a few months. Then came time for the first payout and it turns out that they won’t send money to Canadians, so that money is just kind of out there somewhere.

(“Won’t send money to Canadians” is a glib reduction of the problem, which is reasonable and a valid business decision, but the TLDR is that I won’t be getting any money from Bookshop)

Anyways, what I’m saying is “be ethical and don’t link to Amazon” is a costly demand for an author. Some are going to choose to link to them and some are not, because some can afford those ethics and some can’t.

It’s hard to turn down money that lets you make art!

There’s demand for Effin’ Birds masks and I’m not making them because every sample of an on-demand printed mask I’ve seen has been a terrible mask. That’s a line I don’t want to cross — risking someone’s life for money.

The Amazon thing is more nuanced, but it’s still about livelihoods, and how much I want to weigh my own comfort against someone else’s.