Blog / 2025 / One Simple Trick for Making the World a Little Better

No matter what I say, you’re probably going to keep buying from Amazon. And I understand why. It’s convenient, and it feels like a deal because there aren’t usually shipping fees.

This blog post isn’t about me persuading you to stop. I haven’t managed to convince myself to never buy from Amazon again, so I’d be amazed if I could sway you. I just want to encourage you to adjust your buying habits.

To explain why, I’m going to tell you a story from behind-the-scenes at Amazon—not the one about workers who are still peeing in bottles seven years after the tech giant’s extreme surveillance and anti-bathroom-break performance requirements were first reported, but another story. It’s the tale of a small business, the independent artist that is me.

It starts a few years into my foray of publishing books of my art, when I found Lulu Press, a print-on-demand company.* At the time, Lulu allowed creators to sell through Amazon in an automated process. This meant that a buyer might come across a book on Amazon and place an order, and then Lulu would print it and ship it out. The creator didn’t need to do anything more than meet a few standards and check a box in order to get the exposure of having their title appear on Amazon, so I figured it couldn’t hurt.

Of course I now know that, when you’re dealing with tech giants, anything they offer seemingly “for free” always ends up costing you a whole lot more.

In this setup, Amazon wasn’t doing any real work. It wasn’t creating paintings like this one or writing the book in which this painting appears—I was doing that. And Amazon wasn’t even manufacturing the book or sending it out—that was Lulu’s job. Still, Jeff Bezos demanded more and more money for the visibility his mega-corporation provided.

For years after checking the sell-with-Bezos box, I found myself hiking up the prices on my titles simply to cover the billionaire’s cut. It got to the point where I was earning around $1 on any sale Amazon gave me, while, depending on the title, the company made over $10.

Today, I’ve managed to extricate myself completely from Lulu’s Amazon deal, and Lulu itself seems to have restructured that collaboration some, but the fact remains:

When you buy anything through Amazon, your money goes more to Bezos than to the maker of the thing you purchase.

This is true for independent artists like me and it’s true for other small businesses. We end up listing our creations with the tech giant because we know that, for many people, “Amazon” is synonymous with online shopping. We feel like our stuff won’t get seen at all if we don’t play by Bezos’ ruinous rules.

So here’s my simple trick for making the world a little better:

If you find something you like on Amazon—or on Etsy for that matter—and it appears to be made by a single human or maybe a handful of them, please look for another way to buy that thing.

Click out of the Amazon app and into a browser where you can search for the maker’s name. Maybe they have a site where you can buy directly from them and through which they’ll make a bit more of a profit. It won’t take that much time and it probably won’t be that much more money, but it will make the world a little better.

Over the years, Crime Against Nature, the book which features the meerkat image, has had lots of different pricing. I originally did a run of the book through a local printer and sent out the book myself to buyers, all for around $30 per copy. But, until recently, when I published the 13^th anniversary edition of the book, Crime Against Nature was selling for $52 plus shipping, because of the very bad Bezos deal.

Currently, you can buy a softcover version of the book for $35 plus shipping and I get about $5 from that sale. The hardcover version is $45 and I receive around $5 of those sales too.

In fact, it was only when I got myself away from Amazon’s extortianate fees that I could finally imagine making a hardcover version of the book available. That matters, because, in the last decade or so, many public libraries have been interested in having Crime Against Nature in their collection, but they needed it to be in hardcover.

You can buy (or download) your copy of Crime Against Nature here.