ebook returns

Amazon is pretty liberal about e-book returns, allowing several days after purchase to return. This is plenty of time for someone to read your book and then return it, getting a freebie on which you make no royalty. Fortunately, most people aren't such jerks, but they are definitely out there, especially in highly-read genres like romance.

Bottom line, Amazon is out for Amazon, not to serve the interests of the indie writer trying to make a living. Some very successful indie writers and writer groups have tried to get Amazon to modify their policies, but to not much avail. Amazon does this in the interest of "customer service", and don't really care of the impact that has on the owner of the intellectual property. There isn't much recourse, and you pretty much have to be on Amazon, whether indie or trad published. Traditional publishers, however, definitely get more favorable treatment on Amazon for issues such as this, as they have contracts with them.

@dommichaels Thanks for the reply. Amazon does not charge any kind of "restocking" fee for ebook returns, I presume. So, the negative affect is you think you had X in sales one month, but next month that goes down because they "take back" that revenue.

@joe-benet That's my understanding. Some large ebooks have a "delivery fee" based on how large the file is ... I don't think they ding the author for that, but maybe. It'd be pretty small unless you have a lot of graphics or it's a really long book. My royalties have never been big enough for me to pay too much attention to that.