As to the concern about Amazon arbitrarily setting a price, to their own benefit — if, indeed, it was to their own benefit (i.e. they made more money because they lower your price), that would assumedly be because they thought they could sell significantly more units at the lower price. (“Price elasticity of demand.” I do suppose they could be thinking across multiple titles, “We’ll sell more of title X if we lower the price of title Y from another author”, though that seems quite a stretch.)

So, if they were to think they’ll profit more from reducing your price, then they think you’ll earn more too as the author, since the 70/30 split remains the same.

Indeed, I would love it if they could do price elasticity experiments for us as authors, so we could choose the optimal price point to maximize revenue. Fat chance, but it’d be cool.

(A lot of people would probably also start pulling titles if Amazon played too many games without permission, so they don’t have infinite latitude.)

I agree that author support could be better and faster, and it’s a bummer you lost money on their error, but all in all, they’re still the best game in town in terms of maximum total income. (I.e. highest unit sales vs. others and paying a higher percent than others like B&N.) In a general sense, what’s good for Amazon right now is reasonably closely aligned with what’s good for the author.