Erg to Amazon. Just when I was getting happy.
So, I finally get a serious nod in The New York Times Book Review and Amazon & my publisher are in some hot dispute!
***
Imagine my puzzlement when someone emailed me Friday evening complaining that my book wasn't available on Amazon.com.
I checked it out myself: Indeed, it was listed, but no buy button. You could purchase it from a third party, but you couldn't even pre-oder it from Amazon. It looked like it was out of print.
I emailed my editor and publicist and they responded that they were totally miffed--that they would try to get to the bottom of it. I guess no one told them, just as no one told me, that all books from Macmillan, one of the largest publishers in the United States, had vanished from Amazon.com. Macmillan's imprints include Farrar, Straus & Giroux, St. Martins Press and Henry Holt.
The disappearance, it turns out, is the result of a disagreement between Amazon and book publishers that has been brewing for the last year. Macmillan, like other publishers, asked Amazon to raise the price of electronic books from $9.99 to around $15. Amazon said no. Macmillan pushed the point, and Amazon responded by removing Macmillan books--and not just the ebooks.
According to Publishers Marketplace, all of Macmillan's books--including bestsellers, top releases, and Kindle editions--were removed from Amazon's site. Macmillan Kindle titles all lead to pages that read, "We're sorry. The Web address you entered is not a functioning page on our site." It's the first shot across the purchasing bow in big publishers' efforts to reset ebook pricing above the loss-leader $9.99 price point and retake control over that pricing by moving from the wholesale selling model to an agency selling model.
Kindle customers further reported on Amazon forums that any Macmillan books that were on their "wish lists" disappeared from those lists with no explanation, as apparently did Macmillan sample chapters that had been downloaded previously.
Macmillan has answered only with a paid announcement in Publishers Marketplace addressed to its authors: "You are a vast and wonderful crew. It is impossible to reach you all in the very limited timeframe we are working under, so I have sent this message in unorthodox form. I hope it reaches you all, and quickly. Monday morning I will fully brief all of our editors, and they will be able to answer your questions. I hope to speak to many of you over the coming days."
It's a wild development in book publishing and book selling, and of course disappointing and deflating for me as an author to have my book caught up in it...
***
Moral: Shop your local independent.
Other moral: The publishing industry sucks.
Is writing worth anything? In the age of digital media, do words and ideas have value--or is paper the only thing that has value in the marketplace?
Does Amazon have the power to set all the rules of publishing and book selling? Should they? Is their unannounced action on a Friday evening fair play?
Where do you buy your books?
(Lots of folks have been writing saying they want to boycott Amazon but can't beat their prices. Here is a place to get books cheap: Strand Books
posted by Contact at 11:41 AM
8 Comments:
Bah, Amazon. I always my books on half.com anyway. That is, when I can't make it to my local independent. Or FIND one of them dinosaurs.
i do IT work at a university press and have had mixed feelings about ebooks in general and the pricing of ebooks in particular. i've heard the impassioned arguments from both sides (and tend to favor one of them) and have my doubts that a "peaceful resolution" is in sight.
the problem with amazon is that is such a behemoth -- and knows it -- that it can (and does) throw its weight around to create the online book-buying world in the image it wants to create. if it says ebooks should be sold for $9.99 then, by God, they will be OR those ebooks wont be on sale at amazon.
they're, in many ways, the walmart of booksellers. they purchase in such mass quantities that they can set all the rules.
as a former grad school prof once told me, "if you control the channels of distribution, you control the industry."
...
Eek. I buy most children's books from the independent children's bookseller in town but we don't have too much in the way of independent booksellers here otherwise (I have found sort of a collector's store). I need to check out online versions of other towns' indies.
I'm probably most professional authors' worst nightmares. I use the library for most of my reading. If it's fairly obscure and the library doesn't have it and I can't cajole it from someone with access to an academic library, I check on A1 books to see how much it sells for there. If it's new, I'll go by Bluestockings Books and see if they have it there.
by the way, amazon & macmillan seem to have resolved their dispute. Potential readers can now buy new copies of your book at 2/3 the price that they would buy it at most stores. (Now having a book of my own, I am quickly learning that amazon is *the* worst in terms of giving back to the authors!)
Looking forward to seeing it. Wonder if it's an impractical item to carry on (along with my camera and 50 rolls of film) my 16-hour plane ride to Hong Kong in a couple of weeks.
Too bad the very nice review that was on the Bluebird Amazon page is gone now!
Turns out Strand Books is sold out of Bluebird. Here's another good site to buy it: http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?kn=gore&tn=bluebird&x=0&y=0
You can get it here with free worldwide delivery: http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/book/9780374114893/Bluebird?gbase=true&utm_medium=Google&utm_campaign=Base&utm_source=UK&utm_content=Bluebird Good option for UK people who want to avoid Amazon.
I think Amazon is right on one point - ebooks do have to be cheaper to get people to want to buy them. When they're cheap enough, they become really attractive to lots of people. But I worry about authors' profits being squeezed and I think we still need publishers as gatekeepers of quality. So... I don't know what the answer is, but it calls for peaceful discussion not heavy-handed tactics.
Did you see the post your sorta labelmate Erica Kennedy did on this? http://thefeministafiles.blogspot.com/2010/02/fem-beefs-goliaths-warring-while-davids.html
Anywho, I'm for e-books, but I don't think they can be capped at $9.99 and do anyone any good. I think they're trying to compare it to iTunes, but if you think about it, even that price point wasn't so well below the physical CD price point.
Hopefully the coming iPad will sort this out. If Apple is offering full color books that you can actually read in a dark room for $12.99 to $14.99, then it's going to be hard for Amazon to stick to their price point.
Still, I haven't even asked my own publisher about the issue, b/c I sorta don't even want to deal with it.
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