Yes, Amazon currently has an Afrikaans section spanning over 3000 titles, although there is little to no information easily available (that I know of) that shows how well Afrikaans authors are using Amazon to publish independently. After years publishing South African authors on Amazon shelves I thought it was time that someone had a look at which Afrikaans authors had a presence on the world’s largest eBook store, how they are selling and what they are doing right (or wrong).

I chose to analyse authors on the Afrikaans shelves at Amazon because these shelves clearly should belong to us as South Africans. If I wanted to examine South African authors who write English fiction for example, it becomes impossible to easily and accurately extract exactly which authors within the English category, publish from our sunny shores, as all the English authors are grouped together. Afrikaans has its own clearly designated eBook category, so we are able to accurately assess our local authors’ performance.

The January 2015 report on author earnings is enough to make most authors sit up and pay attention to the Amazon publishing machine. Headlines like 33% of eBook sales from Amazon.com are indie (self-published) authors or 40% of all dollars earned by authors on eBook sales from Amazon.com are earned by Indie authors all highlight the gradual shift away from the pure traditional publishing paradigm and highlight the success that can be achieved by authors not afraid of learning or experimenting with self-publishing.

This is so damn exciting for a community emerging from under the monopolistic blanket held by the big 5 publishers world-wide over the past few decades. Up until 2007 authors did not have a much of a choice but to collect rejection notices from publishers who, for business reasons, did not or could not accept their books for publication. Since 2007 however, Amazon’s KDP platform and its suite of other offerings aimed at Indie authors have had the author-community gripped in a wave of excitement.

I had to share this hilarious story concerning self-published author Graeme Reynolds and his battle with Amazon after they removed his eBook titled "High Moor 2: Moonstruck"  from their virtual shelves. In correspondence that was emailed through to the poor author with the subject title: Kindle Quality Notice, it emerges that due to a complaint received from a customer regarding the excessive use of hyphenated words (yes you read that correctly) the eBook was an eye-sore (hyphen intended) and was subsequently removed from sale. 

This does seem to be a slight over-reaction by the world-leading, eBook-selling giant (I wonder if these hyphens are an eye-sore yet?) The great news is that after a short while Amazon did return to it's senses and published the eBook back into the store-front. (Hyphens and all) It shows that Amazon does make mistakes and a word of caution to self-published authors publishing into the Amazon store to keep an eye out for an email from the dreaded "quality department"...

Read more on Graeme Reynolds explict-laden blog post here.