A Question of Ethics for the #Christian #Indie #Writer

So, I know I try to focus things around here more on the reader end of things than the writer end, but I’m struggling with a question of ethics and thought it seemed like a reasonable thing to throw out here and see if those of you who stop by had anything to offer.

See, the course of action that is prevalent in indie circles is to write a series and then, once you have a few books out, you set the first book free on all platforms. The theory is that the free books gives folks a chance to get hooked on the series and then, because they love it so much, they’ll go on and purchase the remainder of the books.

Amazon is very clear in their terms of service that the lowest price they’ll allow as a permanent price point is $0.99. So to make a permanently free book, you have to set it free on the other available bookstores and then ask Amazon to price match it.

Now I’ll admit straight up that this already makes me slightly uncomfortable. After all, if Amazon has their rule, then using a loophole to get around the rule is…sketchy to me. Amazon is allowed to make their rules and if we want to play at their house, then we need to follow their rules. Though I suppose the alternative argument is that they could refuse to price match people who are gaming the system that way if they really cared about their rule.

Regardless, I’ve been chatting with the small press who did my first seven books and talking about the possibility of setting Joint Venture, the prequel novella for the Grant Us Grace series, to be permanently free, as I’d love to see more people find and enjoy that series. So, after some back and forth, we decided to do it and when the publisher logged into Barnes and Noble to set the novella as free…she discovered that B&N also has a rule that the minimum price they allow is $0.99.

So I asked in one of the indie groups if this was a new thing (thinking that maybe B&N and Amazon were working to get rid of free. Because free does still cost them something as they pay for delivery of the product to your e-reader, plus their hosting costs, etc.) so I could understand that they don’t love free. Turns out no, it’s not new.

See, there’s an even bigger loophole in play. If you use a site that will publish your book to multiple platforms for you (rather than you uploading to each place individually), you can set the price to $0 there and, for whatever reason, B&N etc. will all accept the free price, regardless of their rule.

And this leads me to my ethical question: How does a Christian participate in this process once they know that they’re violating rules through an unchecked loophole? Should they be okay with the “Well, everyone’s doing it and if the bookstores really cared they’d stop it” argument? Or should a Christian author refuse to participate, even if it means potential loss of revenue, because they choose to uphold an ethical standard that includes playing according to the rules, regardless of how they feel about those rules?