I noticed a couple of vendors at Amazon are selling my self-published (CreateSpace) book. Print book, $9.95 my price, but they're asking $42 and $45. This just seems...odd to me. I'm not complaining, maybe their overpricing will drive people to buy the $9.95 copy, but I'm curious about the how and why of the situation. Have any of you run into this?
Amazon vendors selling my self-published book
- Thread starter SelfPubber
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They list the book, basically for free, and if some confused person buys it they will buy a copy and resell it. Just about every in-print book has a few opportunistic listings of this sort.
Exacerbated in some cases by automatic price-matching software. (Explained to me on a used-book site.) One seller prices his book a little over the going price (maybe he has a really nice copy), next guy's price matching software is scanning for comparisons, bumps up the price of next guy's copy to match, and so the price spirals up. There might not even be a copy of the book on offer in the first place - as Veinglory says, if they get a taker, they buy a cheap copy and pocket the difference.