Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Ouch

One person on Kindleboards is reporting that Amazon sent him an email saying they were pulling his titles because he raised the price to $2.99 and they're still elsewhere at 99 cents (as I reported previously, it takes Smashwords a relatively long time to correct this stuff). Wow... pulling his titles is kind of harsh (surely lowering the Amazon price would be adequate?). I hope this is an automated system response, and that Amazon will be willing to work with authors who are caught in this sort of bind.

Meanwhile, every one of my books seems to be available for sale again EXCEPT my bestseller. I sincerely hope the sales rankings aren't functional right now. If NLaS drops badly in the rankings because it wasn't available, I shall be very... put out.

ETA: Update from Amazon: "Books in this category will not be removed/unpublished/banned from the website, but will be made unbuyable for a short time, to let other parts of our price matching logic catch up. We'll work on the wording of that message to make it more clear."

And my books are all selling again, yay!

2 comments:

  1. Is that ETA in reference to when they find your book cheaper elsewhere? They're letting other sites catch up to THEIR price matching logic? *laugh*

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  2. I'm not sure exactly WHAT it means. It does at least mean they won't entirely remove your book (with all its rankings and review data), which would be horrifically impolite. My guess is that it means that they'll take it down temporarily while they contact the author and say, "Hey, you're selling your book for less on B&N, so we're reducing your royalty."

    The big issue, as I said before, is that it appears they're arguing with discounted prices-- ie, if I listed my book to Smashwords at $2.99, but Kobo discounts it to $1.59, Amazon will still not allow me to sell it at $2.99. This is going to make it impossible for almost anyone to work with Smashwords-- and maybe killing off poor little Smashwords is part of their evol plan, or maybe Amazon doesn't care and just wants to make sure it's not being undercut. Either way, it's likely to put any author with books on other sites in a real bind. And the sites are all slow to update, so it could be a good two months before people can correct their prices.

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