Amazon sucks...

That fucking bully of a company has always been a pain in the ass -- I speak from experience, having been banned by them, once, and semi-banned a second time. Now they've gone one venal step farther into the hell of avariciousness. Apparently third party book sellers can now buy the right to show up first when you want to buy a new book from Amazon...before Amazon's own page listing that book. Seriously. Here's what the little shits told me when I asked to have the Amazon listing appear first when someone links to my hardback book --

...(T)his is an automated process and cannot be manually updated based on your request. Though seller Prepbooks is coming up first in the search, potential customers still have the option to purchase the book directly from Amazon. Amazon has allowed third-party sellers to compete for the Buy Box across categories for many years. We’ve now extended this policy to books. In some instances, the winning merchant will be a third-party seller instead of Amazon as in this case.

In other words, Fuck off. We'll do what we fucking want and if you don't like it, too bad. And then they make it damn near impossible to find the link to their actual listing so you can buy.

I'd tell them to do the fucking to themselves, but I do want The Alice '65 to get read, and it is set up with Kindle, so...it is what it is. The book's also available on Barnes & Noble and I'm going to make an ebook available in Smashwords, too. If they don't like it, too bad. Not everyone has a Kindle or a Reader, and this'll make it available to all sorts of venues.

I'm trying to see the up side of this -- that maybe it will make the book more noticed and easier to get...but I'm pretty sure I'm bullshitting myself. It's just a tacky, vile move by a money-grubbing asshole's company to increase their monetary gain all while paying their employees starvation wages. The fact that Czar Snowflake is attacking them (with lies and stupidity, as is usual from him) is raising conflicts within me...however since that asshole in the White House is a danger to the world and not just my book, he gets my disdain and Amazon my vague support.

But very vague...