How DO You Return An EBook???

Hello friends and fans!

Today I’m going to indulge my frustration a bit, and talk about eBook selling platforms (like EBooks2Go) offering buyers refunds and returns on eBooks. How is this fair, and more importantly, how do they get away with it?

Life as an indie author is pretty tough! Face it, we spend our days hoping for a few big sales – well, no… we spend our days writing… and dreaming – and while we have our books up on one or more (in my case several) book aggregator platforms, we live in hope for those sales.

I suppose during these harder times, we hope for any old sale. Every time I see a notification of a new sale – ANY sale – I feel a little relief and the lifting of a weight on my shoulders, by however small a measure.

About a week ago, I was happy to see two small sales for a couple of my short preview items on EBooks2Go. It only added up to $1.18, but in terms of near-worthless South African “Ronts”, times fifteen or so – well, let’s just say it all adds up and leave it at that!

This morning I got up and checked my sales dashboards to see if there’d been any movement anywhere. Usually no – or not much – but today I saw one of them had moved, and in the negative direction!

Some eBook aggregators have an unnerving proclivity to shock and surprise me with the idiotic things they get up to. Lulu for example, revamped their entire website back end in early 2020 – presumably having got bored during their lockdown! They trashed their entire perfectly good and understandable dashboard and replaced it with some garbage thing that provides no information to the user at all – making the act of publishing a book (which should have taken five minutes or less to the practiced user familiar with the previous wizard) an act of self-abuse and masochism akin to self-flagellating themselves before the altar of futility.

It is the reason I closed my Lulu account and removed my books from their channels and invested my assets and energies elsewhere.

EBooks2Go is a decent free book publishing and sales platform (provided you already have ISBN’s from elsewhere) and aside from one or two snaffles with their royalty calculation and payment system (which near as I can figure it, pays out once a year, or if you email them a reminder) they’ve been friendly, helpful and eager to please. I’ve had some good sales via their distribution network, so over-all I’m happy with their service… however, there’s just one thing about them that pisses me off, and that’s their tendency to pander to the Karen’s of the book-selling world!

Look, I can understand a customer buying a paperback from a store and then changing their mind (within a few days of purchase, otherwise the book might have been read and is second-hand) – but would anyone please, please tell me how – HOW IN THE LIVING FUCK do you return an eBook????

Have they thought any of this through?

The customer orders and pays for an eBook on a website and is then given download instructions, after which they download the epub, pdf or mobi file. They’ve already received the book. Regardless of whether or not they’ve suddenly “changed their mind” AFTER downloading the file, WHY do these people accede to the ridiculous expectation that they can just ask for a refund???

Yes, I’m upset. Not only have two sales been reversed and I’ve lost the amount in question (regardless of how pitifully small) – but the individuals responsible now have their money back AND copies of the files they downloaded, which they can read at their leisure!

Why don’t I just give away my books for free? I mean, it amounts to the same thing in the end, doesn’t it?

No!

Let’s be clear here – they bought it, they read it… to the point where they decided they didn’t like it (or just want to take a chance and get their money back) – but they’ve read it, which means they got what they paid for: end of transaction, end of story!

A digital file cannot be “returned”. Every time you email it, you create copies of it – and if EBooks2Go expects (or even cares) whether people demanding returns deletes the files or emails they’ve sent, is unclear – but regardless, the aggregator refunds the pirate “client”, defunds the author – and the only one who gains in the process is the person who gets their money back and keeps a copy of the book!

All this does is create a hostile, toxic climate where the author gets ripped off to the benefit of a minority of prima donnas who should rightly wear tricorn hats and get Jolly Roger tattoos!

This has happened to me once before with the same aggregator, and although I discussed my feelings on the matter with them – along with a lengthy email submission on the illogic of their pandering to diva clients, nothing has changed. I doubt it ever will – and since it’s their platform, there isn’t anything I can do about it… or is there?

If I want to use their platform – or so the “terms & conditions” broadly suggest – I need to agree to their terms, regardless of what they are.

Except I don’t really have to put up with this shit, do I?

I write my books for the love of it – but I put them up to sell… well to sell – not to just give them away by default because of some daft short-sighted policy carved in stone at the book-selling company!

Perhaps I should remove my books from there as well? I already have them on three other platforms, and I could easily distribute the load between them to cover the same destinations. I’m seriously considering that in the meantime.

End rant.

As always, feel free to email or message me via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn if you have any comments or questions! (Just push hate mail under the door – use your pitchfork if necessary.)

All material copyright © Christina Engela, 2021.