If you don’t want to read the entire court decision RIGHT HERE, I’ll break it down for you.

An AuthorHouse author claimed Amazon sold more copies of his book than were reported to him by AuthorHouse. He specifically mentioned the “new and used” copies on Amazon.

Choosing AuthorHouse to publish his book was his first mistake. His second mistake was representing himself in court (pro se), which is always a bad idea! A good lawyer could have gotten to the bottom of this right away, and saved the author time and money.

I have explained this before and I will probably have to do so again. The large publishing services companies use Ingram as their distributor. Ingram sends an automated feed about available books to their retail partners. In other words, when you see a book’s cover, list price, description, etc. on Amazon, that appears automatically when Ingram sends/updates their feed to Amazon and others. Companies who use that feed are not just Amazon and other large stores, but also any Amazon reseller who has an Ingram account. In a nutshell, if you have an account at Ingram, you can receive their feed, and sell their books on your own website, and even on Amazon.

If, and only if, someone orders a copy from those Amazon resellers will those resellers then order a copy from Ingram for the customer. In other words, most (if not all!) of those “new and used books” don’t even exist yet! Yes, even the so-called “used” ones! They are print on demand titles. They will only get printed when Amazon or the reseller orders a copy from Ingram.

Why was the entire scenario ridiculous? Had AuthorHouse or even Amazon explained this very simple fact to the author (or to the court!!), he would not now be on the hook for paying Amazon’s expenses as a result of his lawsuit. Amazon refused to provide sales information to the court. They or AuthorHouse could have simply explained how the system works to the author and/or to the judge and this wouldn’t even be a story in the news. The filing doesn’t say how much the author owes Amazon in fees but I imagine it’s a LOT!

The author could have also contacted me at my Ask Angela link and I could have explained the process, and saved him months of stress and expenses as well.

NOTE: AuthorHouse is owned by Author Solutions, which owns many other companies under a variety of names. See: Lots of Imprints and Lots of Complaints! Could You Unwittingly Crawl into Bed with Author Solutions?

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