Todays SHuSH is about athlete and author David Goggins and his Amazon troubles. Third-party resellers were selling counterfeit copies of his book and Amazon was doing nothing to stop it.

Here’s the most astonishing thing about this story. Amazon had a monopoly on David Goggins. He self-publishes through a small Austin-based firm called Lioncrest. Apart from a few signed copies he sold on Shopify and in a small New Jersey bookstore, Can’t Hurt Me for years was only available on Amazon, either in hardcover or print-on-demand paperback.

Goggins went as far as to buy copies from these third-parties to prove that they were counterfeit:

By 2023, Goggins and company had learned that if they personally identified fake copies on the site, purchased them, and confronted Amazon with the evidence, the listing of the offending third-party seller would be removed. But by then there were so many third parties selling fakes on the platform that this approach became “expensive, unrealistic, and unsustainable.” He was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars fighting counterfeiters.

Catch that? The only way to get Amazon to delist these vendors was to give the vendors money. Don’t buy from Amazon.

There’s so much more in the piece. Please click and read the whole thing. Then go to your local independent bookshop.