And those promotions should be a cost of Amazon, not the authors. Weird how Amazon can take your product, sell it for a quarter of the price, and then claim they now owe you no money.
Now they do also have sales where they sell books for like $5 or something; if those sales are not opt-in, of course that's a problem. But I have a hard time believing they're not opt-in.
If you don't like it, your job is to turn down that offer.
Sure, and disappear, because you're not listed by the bad deal company that has container-ships-of-money for marketing.
And you can put your spoken word content on eg Spotify or Youtube, too. There is competition.