Let’s say I go with BookLocker instead. Everybody I know buys their books (ebook or paperback) on Amazon. If the paperback listed on Amazon is not POD-created by the Amazon subsidiary, who fulfills the order? Who notifies the POD publisher to print a copy, and who ships the copy to the buyer?
Last week, on a publisher’s list, someone wrote in asking about NovelRank.com. He wanted to know if their numbers only came from Amazon, or if they counted third party sellers as well. He said NovelRank was reporting more sales than his printer. That was not at all surprising!
There’s a fix for this problem for online book and ebook sales that’s not that complex and that would also let authors and publishers develop useful marketing data…
I read with interest your piece on the Amazon/BookScan numbers, and I can appreciate how much trouble the inaccurate and misleading data can make for publishers.
Authors who see these incorrect sales numbers on Amazon.com naturally assume those numbers are real, and even underestimated. And, where’s the first place they’re likely to send a complaint? To their publisher!
Back in August, the New York Times published an eye-opening article, alleging disturbing treatment of some employees at Amazon. Amazon refuted many of the allegations in the article (of course)…but what did they leave out of their rebuttal?
An author recently sent in the following when asking about his book sales…
Someone recently brought to my attention that on Amazon, there is a listing for people to buy a “new” or “used” copy of a book (that’s from a P.O.D. source) for a reduced fee or sometimes an extraordinarily high fee. Do you know where these books come from or where I can learn more about this?
Jeff Bezos is a BILLIONAIRE!! He is worth 18.4 BILLION dollars. Instead of putting air conditioning in the ovens his company calls warehouses, he’s blowing his money trying to recover rockets from past space flights. Why?!
Tempted to sign up with one of those POD publishers that are claiming to be FREE? Think again! If you’re a graphic designer and you can layout your book on your own, and if you can create a professional and original book cover on your own, too, and if you want to severely limit your book’s availability (and salability), that’s one thing. But, if you want to get your book published for “free”, in some cases you can forget about having an ISBN (which online and brick and mortar bookstores and libraries require), forget about being distributed by Ingram, the largest book distributor, and forget about a lot of other things as well…
