Here in the mid-year doldrums of 2022 there’s been a rash of news articles getting published about Amazon’s return policies and the recent TikTok trend advocating readers leverage the ‘zon’s return guidelines to buy, read, and return in the space of seven days. I’ve been following the development for a few months now, ever since the anger started bubbling away in various self-publishing communities I follow, where there’s split opinions around exactly how big a problem it is.
The short version, for those who want to get up to speed, runs something like this: Jeff Bezos’ mighty e-commerce river has very generous returns policies around ebooks, refunding your money with no questions asked if it’s returned within a week. It’s a return policy you set up in the early days of ebooks to encourage people to try the format, eliminating the big argument for many people who are on the fence.
Worried you might not enjoy reading on a screen? No worries, we’ll refund things. No harm, no foul, just try it. Worried about buying a book by accident while your sausage fingers fumble with the screen? Worried that these self-published books will not be as satisfying as their traditionally published kin? Worried about handing over your credit card, or that you’re paying too much for a digital file? All problems easily resolved with the returns policy as written. The ‘zon will refund your money, take any royalties off the author’s publishing dashboard, and go on to the next sale.
And you know what: that approach still makes sense, even here in 2022 where ebooks are a mature technology. Ecommerce by its nature has to be generous with returns, because it lacks the tactile surety of being able to see and hold the object you’re paying money for.
But the recent outcry about the returns policy represents an intriguing intersection between psychology, art, and technology, because a thing that makes perfect sense from a business perspective ends up seemingly unfair and worthy of news. I have a theory, and it involves four core layers of contention that are worth contemplating.
LAYER ONE: LOSS AVERSION AND REAL-TIME REPORTING
To understand the first layer of why this has blown up, there’s one thing you need to understand about self-publishing: Most vendors — and particularly Jeff Bezos’ big river — reports sales to self-publishers in something akin to real time, but pay several months later.
So if you go out and buy a book I’ve written from most e-book stores, I’ll see the royalty for that sale in my reports within an hour or two. Amazon will take it a step further and show a showcase an expected profit for the month. This is hugely beneficial in a lot of ways, since I can see when a book is picking up momentum and throw a little extra promotion behind it. It also allows me to make rough plans, knowing how much money will arrive in my business account to over expenses in two months.
But real-time tracking means I’ll often see income drop in real time as well. Book returns will see my monthly income decrees by the cost of the return. If you return a book right after purchase, I probably won’t notice it at all without digging deeper into the data… but if you wait two or three days, separating the money coming into the account from the money coming out, it becomes more noticeable.
And if that we split those seven days across the end of one month and the start of the next, the reporting will list the return as a net loss, because Amazon has already bundled up the income from last month.
For an author and publisher my scale, that happens two or three times a month, and has since I started publishing. It’s irritating, but easily solvable: I try not to check sales reports in real time, and focus on looking once a week, and tend not to notice the occasional return. For authors who move a lot of ebooks on the ‘zon— and there are authors who kill it on TikTok and really move product at the moment — those fluctuations are really noticeable. They see their monthly reporting fluctuate by hundreds or thousands of dollars in a day, and every sale feels temporary and unreliable.
And here’s the thing about humanity: we’re far more loss-adverse than gain-focused. We feel the sting of losing a hundred bucks far more than we’re satisfied by making a hundred dollars, and once sales appear on your dashboard already converted into profit, even the smallest decrease is a loss because you’ve rationalised it as ‘your’ money.
This is the first layer of psychology that’s caused the sudden outcry against the ‘zon’s return policy, but it’s not the only element worth paying attention to.
LAYER TWO: THE CLASH BETWEEN SOCIAL AND MARKET NORMS
Dan Ariely Predictable Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions lays out an argument that we live caught between two sets of norms: the social and the market. One side is fuzzy and driven by an understanding that value offered will even out in the aggregate, while the other is hard-edged and focuses on immediate exchange of value. Building on the research of Margaret Clarke and her co-authors, Ariely notes that society hums along just fine when the two are kept in separate domains, but when the mix, things go boom in unexpected ways because the norms get fuzzy.
This is nothing new to most writers and artists, whose business lives in the intersection between the market. Art has long been part of what anthropologists have dubbed the gift economy, where something of value is not sold, but offered up without implicit agreement or expectation of direct reward (although the hope of indirect awards are part of the dynamic).
It’s right there in the way we talk about art and artists: the suggestion that they create because they’re gifted or inspired, rather than hard-working artisans who have learned a craft; the baseline discomfort we have with the commercialisation of art, and artists who embrace it; the entire philosophy that great art is a cultural good, and should be preserved and paid-for by governments in the form of grants, museums, libraries, and other infrastructure.
The gift economy is inherently social in its norms, which means the commodification of art in the era of late capitalism is replete with moments where the market bleeds into a social space. Often, the most visible manifestations of this occur on the reader end of the relationship: justifications that piracy is justified because artists shouldn’t be in it for the money; the scorn directed at artists with the temerity to value their work and their time; the assumption that all artists are rich, yet do nothing of value, because the state should support anyone who produces great and worthy work.
Far less is made of the way creators interact the intersection, but it’s definitely out there: writers who respond to criticism with anger, irritated that someone would question their integrity or quality of their art; the refusal to talk money or business outside of a few areas; the inherent acceptance that other people will take care of the business side, because they’re just meant to be creators; the tendency to value rewards that enhance cultural value over monetary renumeration.
LAYER THREE: USING SOCIAL NORMS AS A MARKET TOOL
Social norms and gift economies may be fuzzy, but that doesn’t mean the exchanges that take place there aren’t real and valuable. Hire me to help you move house, and I’ll probably work hard… and get irritated about how much I’m getting paid per hour, because that’s the nature of market thinking. Ask me to help you move as a friend, and I’ll show up with a smile on my face and work to hammer the job out as quickly as possible, all for a thank-you and a slice of pizza once the job is done.
This extends far beyond doing favours for a friend. As Ariely notes:
There are many examples to show that people will work more for a cause than for cash. A few years ago, for instance, the AARP asked some lawyers if they would offer less expensive services to needy retirees, at something like $30 an hour. The lawyers said no. Then the program manager from AARP had a brilliant idea: he asked the lawyers if they would offer free services to needy retirees. Overwhelmingly, the lawyers said yes. (Ariely, Dan. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions, p. 81).
Businesses have been trying to leverage this dynamic in recent years, from offering social perks and team-building outings to framing work as a mission rather than a job. Psychologically, this all hinges on moving folks from one set of norms to another. Frame a relationship as market exchange, and we’ll do the cost-to-benefit math in one way. Frame it as a social exchange, and the math works out differently.
This also infiltrates their marketing, where they’ll push customers to feel like a social group, rather than a source of revenue. It’s an approach many authors have run with in recent years, as the internet has given us the ability to speak directly to our audiences, and there’s countless authors who recruit unpaid street teams and reviewers by leveraging the social value of being a fan.
The challenge with pulling businesses into the social realm is simple: the moment you even hint at the market getting involved, we stop thinking like social animals and behave like cogs in the market.
For artists, the lesson is simple: society is happy for you to profit from your work, so long as it doesn’t feel like you want to profit for it. Similarly, you are quiet happy to work countless unpaid hours in pursuit of your art, so long as you keep thoughts of the market out of the equation (as a side note: this is one challenge I have in writing content like this for Patreon, which places a market price on what used to be a social exchange. Blogging used to be so much easier before it felt like I was getting paid for it).
Amazon is among the industries that have relied upon the social contract as a strategy, reaching out to self-published authors with a promise to free them from the market-driven tyranny of the traditional publishing market and it’s economies of scale. Authors would get total control over their books, freedom to reap the rewards of their own efforts, and self-publishing gets framed as a social good compared to the evils of the market. For many indie authors, who aren’t altogether conscious of the industry and its norms, Amazon is effectively the latest iteration of the friendly publisher/agent who takes care of that icky market-driven business stuff so they can focus on their art.
So while the decision to offer free with returns makes perfect sense within marketing norms, it’s feels like a violation of the social contract many authors have with Amazon. A reminder that they’re a cog, rather than a trusted partner (make no mistake—indie authors have always been cogs, Amazon’s just very good at making them feel like they’re not).
Of course, artists aren’t the only area of our culture where the social and the market come into conflict: from running for public office to motherhood to the minutia of dating, our society is full of edge cases, and they’re all sites of contention because norms aren’t clear-cut and easily managed.
But there’s definitely one area of society where the conflicts between social norms and market norms has really come into focus, generating more contentious arguments than nearly anywhere else It’s come to the forefront of the last twenty years , and been the site of more contentious clashes between social and market norms than nearly any territory that came before.
We call it social media.
LAYER FOUR: ANTI-SOCIAL MEDIA
By it’s nature, Social Media leverages the social contract and tries to hide the market exchange taking place: sites like Facebook, TikTok, and Twitter offer us the ability to connect with others (a socially valuable thing) and in exchange we are marketed to and our data is mined as a valuable commodity (a market norm). We mostly accept that, despite the egregious problems this data-mining causes, so long as they’re not too overt about things. Now and then the market forces become overt, and we feel conflicted about our use of such platforms for a while, but mostly we’re quite content to resume our usage so long as their social value remains high.
This applies to users of the platforms as well. Business who post something witty and funny and socially apt can have a viral hit, getting reposted thousands of times as people delight in the content they’ve produced. A business with an overt marketing message will be a source of frustration in our feeds, more likely to get hidden than re-posted.
In short, we’re happy for businesses to be there, so long as they’re operating in the social mode. Treat your socials like a gift, not an advertising stream, and you’re behaving as expected.
It’s a familiar dynamic for artist and writers, so it’s not surprising that so many of us flock to socials as tool for building up our platforms. We provide content for free, with ambiguous expectations that it will help our more commercial works, and in exchange we get a series of nebulous rewards like visibility and ability to reach our audiences. It’s soft-and-fuzzy marketing for a few of people who have been reliably informed that engaging in overt marketing is crass, commercial, and against the norms of their industry.
And we expect the people we engage with there to respond in the same way. Social-norm patrons and readers who’d be horrified at the violation of the social exchange reading a book and returning it represents, rather than market-driven entities seeking the most value for the least outlaw, for whom the read-and-exchange makes perfect market sense.
In this sense, the read-and-return behaviour driving the current outcry is a triple betrayal of social norms: both Amazon, and the readers, and the social media platforms we rely on have switched tracks to market-driven norms in unison, and in numbers that make authors very concerned about what happens if this goes on.
Because the great truth of art is this: if you ever translated it into purely market-driven terms, and artists and writers needed to be paid what their time and talent are worth, the entire system falls apart.
HOW BAD IS IT, REALLY
For the vast majority of the authors seeing returns at the moment, it’s a slight uptick, but not a statistically significant amount. More frustrating than catastrophic. For others, it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of Amazon’s business practices leading them to a core misunderstanding they’re being charged for each return.
For a small percentage, it’s a huge deal indeed, with returns throwing out cash flow projections and making month-to-month budgeting near impossible. I suspect their number are smaller than anyone expects, and the frustration is a major source of stress.
But it doesn’t change the core driver of the current outcry: Authors are playing the gift economy game, and they feel like they’re getting screwed because the market has interjected itself. As a short-term phenomenon, it’s not such a big deal, but as a long-term tend it’s going to mess with a lot of the norms that keep books and publishing running, and that’s going to change a lot of folks relationships with their business.
That said, Amazon returns are actually a bigger issue across the board, especially when it comes to physical items. And traditional publishing has been dealing with unstable month-to-month income generated by physical book returns—which can come up to a year after the book has been on sale—and they’re still ticking along.
It’s definitely possible to adapt to this, and work around the uncertainty, but it may involve a transition to market-thinking that’s anathema to many writers.
And in indie publishing circles, which is a broad church occupied by many folks who are a long way from being comfortable thinking about their writing business as a business, the volume of voices railing against that are going to be loud.
Currently, the collective response from many authors is making noise and agitating for the ‘zon to change policy. There’s been some success around this in recent years, when the last market-norm intrusion created problem around the way Amazon handled audio books, but given that it’s less than 18 months since that happened it may be time to consider the idea that Amazon is increasingly going to favour market-driven strategies.
A far smarter response is probably taking steps to move away from the ‘zon as the primary market for books, even if it stays the largest. One of the reasons I embrace direct sales is because I want a relationship with readers that’s driven by social norms, and I can make the choice over when and how I respond with market-norm thinking.