Jesus and the Amazon Kindle

“Jerry said no,” Tom said. “CBS is out.”

The words burst out of the cell phone and hung in the warm October air. They were followed by others, but the cards were already on the table. My back had been against the wall and that wall had just collapsed.

I left my job as a corporate attorney three years ago. I believed that I was following that path that God had laid out before me. The path that began after my step-brother’s death from a PTSD suicide. I started fighting to force the military to take better care of our returning heroes’ traumatic stress injuries. I ended up in a challenging position for lower pay trying to improve the lives of people who live with serious mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, and PTSD.

While it was the right path to make a difference in people’s lives, it was a major blow to our young family’s finances. The effect was exacerbated when my wife became ill and had to cut her hours at work. Our house construction went over budget and my attempt to start a business on the side backfired.

Every month the debt grew deeper, but I was working with a seasoned Hollywood screenwriter-director to sell a television series. What had seemed like a long shot a year ago looked like a lock for the past three months. Today it went away.

I was devastated. My wife was back in the hospital again and the bills were stacking up even further. I cooked the kids’ dinner and tried not to think about losing the house. I put them to bed and lay in my own. I pray every night, but usually just prayers of thanks, requests for forgiveness, and asking Jesus to help me take the path that He wants me to take.

Tonight was different. I told Him that I didn’t have the power to fix my family’s finances. I’d done my best to follow where I thought He wanted me to go, but I had failed. I admitted that I couldn't fix this financial situation myself and begged for help.

I woke up that morning in a horrible mood. I checked my email a little bit after eleven. One of the messages was from someone named Jason who claimed to be from Amazon. Jason said that he was talking to a handful of the most successful self-published authors on the Amazon Kindle and he would like to talk to me. It was a blatant scam. I was a lot more likely to be among the Kindle’s bottom five authors. I had never figured out how to market ebooks on Kindle and my nine or ten sales reflected that.

That made me curious about exactly how low my Amazon Kindle sales had been. I knew that they were bad, but I wanted proof of how wrong this “Jason” was for our later conversation. I opened up the sales report for the past six weeks. I had a sale five weeks ago and another two scattered over the next few weeks.

Then my eyes popped. Two weeks ago I had over six thousand sales. The following week was about the same. The total royalties for those two weeks’ sales almost matched my regular salary for the past year.

After taxes, the royalties would be almost to the dollar how much we owed.

I talked with Jason from Amazon later that day and he told me that Amazon had run a major Kindle marketing campaign this month. They dropped some titles down to nothing in order to get people reading on their Kindles. Amazon would pay the authors and publishers the royalties that they would have been due for the sales.

Any of my thoughts that maybe writing was finally getting the attention that I thought I deserved evaporated. This wasn’t me. It was Amazon and Jesus.

To top it off, I had been all but giving the books away in an attempt to draw in readers until just a few weeks ago when a book reviewer recommended that I raise the price from $0.99 to $9.99. If this woman that I’ve never met hadn’t told me to crank up the price, the bumper crop of sales wouldn’t have made any difference in our family’s finances.

While others may be able to come up with justifications for how this chain of events may have occurred without divine intervention, I cannot.

I was begged for help and it was provided. All I can say is thank you.