“Amazon has sliced the price on all of my books! What gives?”

Q –

“I just checked my books on Amazon and they have sliced the list prices on all of them. Some are so low that they won’t even pay for the printing costs. What’s going on over there?”

– Joseph

A –

We are hearing this from a lot of authors right now. There are three possible reasons:

1. Amazon may be trying to dump some inventory.

2. Amazon may be trying to severely undercut the competition, even at a loss.

3. Amazon may be experiencing database errors.

Regardless of the reason, this should not affect your royalties because Amazon must still pay the distributor or publisher the list price less the discount Amazon receives from those firms. In most cases for self-published books, authors are paid a firm percentage of the list price that is set up in the distributor’s system.

Some authors have “fixed” their Amazon pages by simply ordering copies at those ridiculously low prices. Sometimes, Amazon prevents the author (or any buyer) from ordering too many copies at the reduced price. Other times, they don’t. And, sometimes this sudden flurry of activity for the book may spur Amazon to fix the list price on their website. Perhaps that’s what makes them realized they’re losing money on every copy of the book sold at that price.

If you contact Amazon about this, you’ll likely receive a form email response from them that basically says they can do what they want with regards to product pricing.

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