[Retailer] Amazon

The publishers set the retail price for books sold through Amazon.com. They are required to offer the same retail price to every retailer, although the discount they give each retailer may vary.

There have been times when glitches in Amazon.com's system has set strange prices on books (Nick Pollotta had this problem with one of his books last year IIRC). These are usually fixed by Amazon.com when it is brought to their attention.

The prices come from the publishers.

Prices on some trade paperback reference books can be very steep indeed.

Do you have any particular titles in mind?

The Amazon price on the book is the suggested retail as set by the publisher, and if your publisher offers standard discounts to booksellers, Amazon tends to offer a percentage off.

If you don't offer decent enough discounts, Amazon will sell your book without a discount. And some booksellers will even raise the price of your book. Booksamillion did that for some PublishAmerica books.

My experience:

My book has a cover price of $13.95 I set a 35% discount to vendors.
Amazon price for my book is $13.95.

I saw it listed at EBSCO for about a buck higher. They state right on the page that because my book has "little or no discount" they add 4.50 to the price for "handling" I guess they wanted more than 35% and boosted it accordingly.

I bet if you alter your discount to 40%, the difference will be dramatic.

Amazon Forcing POD Titles to BookSurge - News Item from Publishing News

Amazon has told publishers—both traditional and online print-on-demand houses—that their POD titles will only be sold through the e-tailer's site if the books are printed by its BookSurge subsidiary.

According to several publishers, BookSurge has told them that unless their titles are printed by BookSurge, the buy buttons on Amazon for their titles will be disabled. Publishers that do not use BookSurge can sell POD titles through Amazon's Advantage program (which uses a consignment model) or through third-party vendors.


What do people think about this move by Amazon on POD? What effect might this have on those who are self-published, including through companies like Lulu?

From The Tools of Change Website:

http://toc.oreilly.com/2008/03/amazon-ups-the-ante-on-platform-lock-in.html

We often hold up Amazon as an example of one of the original Web 2.0 companies. Their survival amid the tech meltdown was driven largely by the value of the data they'd acquired through thousands of reader reviews, recommendations, and "people who bought this bought that" collaborative filtering. Amazon was a system that grew more valuable with more users: a network-effect-driven data lock-in.

Amazon Puts the Muscle on POD Printers - From MediaBistro.com

Andy Heidel fills us in on what's been happening in Amazon.com's efforts to make its print-on-demand solution, Booksurge, the market leader by making it that much harder for anybody else to sell their books...

"News of Booksurge's potential POD monopoly has crossed the pond with a disturbing message from an Amazon spokesman in yesterday's Inquirer:

'John Clifford initially denied that this was happening and then admitted that books not converted to BookSurge would have the "buy" button turned off on Amazon.com. He added that Amazon wanted to have no books from other POD publishers available on Amazon.com.'

Methinks that Amazon may run into a federal antitrust problem with this strategy.

Leading UK Publishers Concerns About Amazon on book prices: fair or anti-competitive?

A number of leading writing organisations in the UK are concerned over the issue of whether Amazon may be putting pressure on mainstream commercial publishers not to list their own authors books for lower prices on their publisher websites. Is this fair-play by Amazon in a competitive environment, a case of allegation and counter-allegation, or an indication of something that may work against the interests of writers and readers and something Amazon should be addressed on?

Full Times Article link

Excerpt:

Amazon is angry that Penguin, Bloomsbury and others are discounting titles on their websites, encouraging customers to buy direct instead of using the online retailer ...

There are fears that Amazon may retaliate by regarding a publisher’s online price as the recommended retail price and applying its trading terms to that. Such is the power of Amazon that several publishers did not feel able to talk on the record yesterday. One senior executive said: “It’s very serious. I can’t believe they’d be allowed to get away with it under competition law. Forcing people to increase prices seems to me entirely wrong.”

Others accused Amazon of having become particularly aggressive lately. One source claimed that the online seller recently removed the “buy buttons” from a book on its website to prevent users from being able to purchase it. “They then went to the publisher and said, ‘Give us an extra 2 or 3 per cent or we won’t put the buy buttons back’,” the source said.

An Amazon spokesman said: “It is speculation. We never talk about discussions with suppliers.” He declined to comment further.

I think you're a little confused on what the B&BC forum is for. All these posts about how evuhl Amazon is belong elsewhere; there's lots of other places on AW for them.

Thanks December Quinn. We saw about 5 long threads on Amazon on different topics in 'Bewares' so we thought this might be the place for discussion. It seems like an interesting topic for debate though with so many leading writing organisations weighing in, pro or con, evuul or good or somewhere inbetween. The floor is open.

Perhaps to avoid confusion there should be one thread for issues of concern or debate about Amazon. Maybe prevent this kind of problem. What d'ya think? And I'm sure you're not emotionally insensitive.

Excellent. Thank you for that information to a newbie. Perhaps someone would be kind enough to merge us.

I figured this might be the best place for this, if not please move it mods.

I recently heard a story about one of my hubbys collegues, another small publisher who had a bad experience with amazon in terms of publishing.

The book appeared as an Amazon listing several months before publication, the info seemed to have been collected from Neilsen by Amazon. The book was half price on Amazon and available for pre order from Amazon. This was without any contact with the publisher etc.

The first contact the publisher had was when Amazon contacted them much later, after a considerable amount of pre orders, and said their discount would be 50% which the guy in question was not able to do, basically because it would have meant a loss on every sale.

Anyone else heard or experienced anything similar?

Book Daily

Anyone have any recent experience with Amazon's Book Daily. They supposedly send out emails to people who want to read the first chapter of books in a genre before buying the book. Sounds good, but now costs $49/month. They say you can cancel anytime, but if they don't get cancellation in time to cancel, they, "at their discretion," have the option of returning your money or paying you back by continuing your participation for another month. Sounds worrisome. I can't find anyone who participates in this program either as an author or reader. Any help appreciated.

Bill Rockwell said:

Anyone have any recent experience with Amazon's Book Daily. They supposedly send out emails to people who want to read the first chapter of books in a genre before buying the book. Sounds good, but now costs $49/month. They say you can cancel anytime, but if they don't get cancellation in time to cancel, they, "at their discretion," have the option of returning your money or paying you back by continuing your participation for another month. Sounds worrisome. I can't find anyone who participates in this program either as an author or reader. Any help appreciated.

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Most books have sample chapters available on Amazon, and those samples can be read for free. I can't imagine spending $49 a month to read opening chapters when most publishers make them available for free, either through Amazon or through their own sites (or GoogleBooks, etc.). This doesn't sound like a program Amazon would have. After all, Amazon Prime is $79 a year, and Kindle owners can borrow one book a month for free on that program, as long as the book is included in the Prime Lending Library. (And Prime comes with free streaming movies and free two-day shipping!)

If you have an e-mail, there are people here who are great at analyzing headers to tell you where the e-mail really came from. They can also look at the source code to figure out where the links really go.

This sounds fishy to me. There are countless companies out there who will "publicize" your book for a fee. Most of these involve simply generating either e-mail spam or actual mail spam of some kind, and firing it off to a long list of potential customers.

Unfortunately, not only is your book one of hundreds listed in the e-mails, but most legitimate customers (libraries, etc.) simply ignore this spam barrage completely.

Doing publicity for a book you've published yourself is a mine field. Be very careful, and do a lot of research first.

Oh, of course. This is a program for writers, not readers. Duh, Anne.

I wouldn't bother participating. I signed up to get excerpts from a big name publisher, and I didn't bother reading the e-mails, even when they were authors I had heard about. If readers are getting chapters from authors they've never heard about, particularly indie authors, they are going to do the same. (And this assumes they willingly signed up for the program and aren't just getting spammed.)

If your eBook is on Amazon, you can participate in Look Inside This Book to make sure samples are there for your books. That's a lot more targeted than e-mails people will just end up deleting.

By the way, there is a BookDaily.com, but it's run by ArcaMax Publishing. It has sample chapters from big name publishers as well as indie authors. Still, I can't see this as great exposure as I can read the same samples on Amazon without having to sign up for yet another site.

According to their own press release which is here, Amazon has just acquired GoodReads.

Amazon refusing to publish review?

My mother asked a woman via another friend who runs a writer's group, a published author herself, to look at my eBook. I've never met this woman before, but she submitted what I was told by my mother, via her friend, was a 'glowing review' of my eBook to Amazon and they've refused to publish it. What hope is there? My book has no real sales and can't even get a review on. Thank you Amazon. They are on 65% with this eBook, I assume they know that?

Generally it means they have detected the review is from someone in your circle somehow.

veinglory said:

Generally it means they have detected the review is from someone in your circle somehow.

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"Detected" as in guessed it has to be because it's too positive/upbeat? It's a third party I have no connection to save I am aware she was asked to look at the book in a detached and professional manner.

Without any payment I might add.

ANaughtyMouse said:

Have you seen the actual review she left? She might have mentioned a connection to you, however removed.

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That is my concern, but I doubt someone who has been published and runs a writer's group could be so stupid. It's my mother's friend she has a connection to, not me, but no doubt it's possible. I will hopefully get to read what she said, or find out, but it's small change.