It’s not every day that one helps discover a bug with global implications for a billion-dollar corporation, potentially rattling world markets and triggering anti-trust laws, but I found myself in that very position.
I intended to write this article a few months ago, but a family tragedy altered my priorities and gave me a new perspective on life. Initially, I never intended this blog to have a negative tone. However, as a new author using Amazon KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing), I found it increasingly difficult to ignore some of the strange issues I encountered. After climbing the Best Seller Charts for several months, I gained a rare perspective in rankings that many authors strive for but rarely achieve. I could have remained silent like many others, not wanting to “bite the hand that feeds me,” but I chose to speak truth to power, forcing Amazon to address the proverbial elephant in the room. So here I am again, pointing out another major issue I came across, which had global ramifications.
Several months ago, someone from France mentioned that my book, The Art Nouveau Coloring Book: Hats, Cats, & Vintage Romance, was unavailable in their country, despite being available a few days earlier. I checked neighboring EU countries, and the book was still available there.
One of the benefits of being a KDP author is that your books are automatically available almost everywhere Amazon delivers. By default, my books are available throughout the EU, Canada, Mexico, the United States, the UK, Australia, and Japan. As a coloring book author and illustrator, I don’t have to worry about translations, giving my titles a truly global reach. This is a significant advantage compared to most self-published authors.
The mystery of the disappearing book concerned me, mainly because someone wanted to purchase a copy. I reported the glitch to KDP, and they responded that they were looking into it. Later that evening, Amazon asked me to raise the book’s price by a penny. I had lowered the price by a penny the night before to reposition visibility and hadn’t given it much thought. So I complied with their request.
The next morning, I contacted a manager in the global Amazon KDP office. Initially, she didn’t know what I was calling about, but when I mentioned France, she suddenly remarked, “There’s a huge issue involving antitrust pricing in France right now. All the executives have been in a room next door for hours, yelling at each other about what to do. It’s pretty serious.”
You can imagine my shock. Here I was on a Saturday, just sipping my morning coffee. I explained in detail what had happened and how I was asked to raise my book’s price by a penny. She explained that in the EU, laws prevent book prices from being raised past a fixed amount to avoid unfair pricing practices. This policy helps protect consumers and store owners from price fixing by large retailers like Amazon.
For convenience, Amazon automatically converts the price of books across all available countries whenever I set the main amount in the United States. For example, if I set my coloring book to $4.99 and then to $4.98, Amazon automatically converts that change across Germany, the UK, Canada, etc. By lowering my book by a penny, it uncovered a fractional pricing error in France, which Amazon hadn’t been aware of. In essence, I inadvertently discovered a potential violation of EU anti-trust laws and KDP executives were stuck fretting about how to resolve a major situation.
This issue has serious legal ramifications on a global level. It’s a violation of EU anti-trust laws. While a fraction of a penny might seem insignificant to most people, entire stock exchanges run on such fractions, and these numbers can add up significantly. This means other authors with titles sold in France have also been impacted, as have store owners throughout the EU. This issue could be happening elsewhere, but we won’t know the overall scope of what this means unless Amazon publicly addresses this pricing bug. Perhaps their approach is to simply sweep things under the rug and hope that nobody notices it. Based on my prior experiences with them and their lack of transparency, I wouldn’t hold my breath for them to come clean.
