Amazon Advantage now $99 annual fee!

[Blade_Jones]

I don't know if any of you use Amazon's Advantage program for DVD distribution but I would describe it as a "DISadvantage". First off they pocket 55% of the sale price of your product, and they are allowed to pocket even more if they so choose to increase the price of your title. For a while they had been charging about a $30 annual "administration fee" on top of the 55%. Now I get an email yesterday from them stating that in May (it's already May 26th!) they will be upping their fee to $99 -- a 200% raise! Who do they think they are? In the email it said "inventory and other costs have risen while the annual fee has stayed the same. In order to continue offering new and existing services provided with membership in the Amazon Advantage Program, we increased the annual fee to $99" I think this is just a ruse to force people to pay for advertising or whatever these "new services" are.

This is the final straw. I am cancelling with Advantage. Not gonna GIVE them 80% of my profits.

I can sell my titles digitally without this rip-off fee. I can sell my hard copies via my website and a credit card processing site like ccnow. There's very few hard copy sales these days anyway.

 

[Rayandmigdalia]

You can do reasonably well on Amazon without paying them anything up front, such as their $99 fee. You can list your film totally free. We have used CreateSpace/Amazon to distribute our DVDs and downloads for several years, (Without the fee), and if/when we sell one of our films, they get a cut from the sale. This past month we had 151 sales (mostly downloads).

Personally, I try to avoid any "distribution" situation that charges a fee up front. We also use
VHX, which only charges us if there is a sale. There is no fee to list with them.