Odds are, it’s on Amazon.com. Amazon is no longer the elephant in the room, but that’s only because they’ve grown too big to fit into the room. Amazon controls over 80% of E-book sales, 65% of online print book sales, and 83% of the U.S. e-reader market. They sell 306 million print books and 120 million e-books per year.

And that’s just new books. They also sell around 615 million used books per year, which is almost all of that market.

You can see their dominance when you consider what it means to be an Amazon bestseller versus being a bestseller somewhere else. I’ve seen estimates that a book reaching #100 in sales rank in the Amazon store sells around 1,500 copies per week. A book reaching the same sales rank at Barnes & Noble would see just a few hundred copies per week. That’s why Indie authors like me can’t afford to ignore Amazon, even if we’re sometimes tempted to. For book buyers, Amazon’s combination of convenient shopping, algorithm-generated suggestions based on past buying, and fast, free (for Prime members) shipping is hard to beat.

For authors, there is definitely some downside. First, the cash flow is rather slow, meaning the investment in book production remains tied up for a while. Publishing is a business. Like many small business owners, indie authors are often cash-strapped. They may have spent thousands of dollars on editing, thousands more on interior design and layout, plus still more on cover design, proofreading, and ancillary services. Once the book is ready for market, there will me more spent on Amazon ads, Facebook ads, and whatever other paid marketing efforts are appropriate for a given book. In my case, Kindred Spirits has cost me roughly $8,000 out-of-pocket before the first dime of marketing money gets spent. Yet the time between a sale on Amazon and the author’s receipt of a royalty payment is measured in months. A book sold on Amazon in December will pay me at the end of February.

An even more worrisome financial issue for indies is that we have no way to evaluate the accuracy of royalty statements. If Amazon reports that I sold X number of books last month, I am aware of no way to either verify or disprove the reported figures. I have to take their word for it.

Then there are quality control issues. I’ve read hundreds and hundreds of book reviews over the last six months. And I’m amazed at how many times print books from KDP (Kindle Direct Printing, Amazon’s print-on-demand arm) get dinged in the reviews for having physical defects. I’m talking about things like pages falling out of the bindings, or pages printed in the wrong order. These errors end up saddling authors with bad reviews, even though KDP, not the author, is responsible for printing the book. And getting a refund or exchange for a book bought from Amazon is by no means a sure thing.

Most authors would do whatever they could to turn an unhappy customer into a satisfied one. But people who buy from Amazon are Amazon’s customers, not ours. We don’t know who they are. Amazon knows their names, locations, and purchase histories. We writers know none of those things. In most lines of work, businesses owners know who their typical customer is. Operating without that knowledge, without that connection to the buyer, can be a handicap.

For all of these reasons, I intend to give my readers another choice. I’ll be selling Kindred Spirits direct-to-consumer via my own storefront on Shopify. I’ll be able to connect with my buyers, take personal responsibility for quality control issues, and get paid more timely. I’ll have no uncertainty about how many books I’ve sold this way. I’ll be able to let readers know when the next installment in the series is ready. And don’t let me forget to mention signed copies for those who want them!

If there is a downside to direct sales, I think it’s small. Shipping won’t be free.And it may not be quite as fast. If you want to start reading a print book the day after your purchase, Amazon will still be your best bet. But for everyone else, you have a choice. Including your local, independent, bricks-and-mortar bookstore There are a lot fewer of those than there used to be. I encourage you to buy from them from time to time to help keep a local small business in business.

Wherever you do your buying, my new novel will be available for sale this Friday, December 1. I’m hoping you’ll be among the new book’s first readers!