Amazon strongarms authors

Head:Sub/Head got my attention today with his post talking about Amazon's new sales policy. It seems that Amazon will not allow books published through Lulu, iUniverse or other print-on-demand service to be sold through their site.

Why on Earth would they ever do that? Because they have their own in-house print-on-demand service - BookSurge. Of course, they will sell books published through BookSurge.

To verify the story, I checked with a few of my own online sources - including a self publishing group. For awhile, there was some debate about whether or not this new policy was rumor. But then someone provided a link to the Wall Street Journal story, and ergo, it appears that it is true.

For those who still think that self publishing is the same thing as vanity printing, it is not. It has reached a level of respectability.

Bill Mize, author of the Denton Ward and Monty Crochetti Mystery Series was nominated by the Private Eye Writers of America for The Shamus Award in 2001. Who was his publisher? iUniverse. It was the first print-on-demand book to be nominated for a major award.

Since that time, Lulu and others have come on the scene, producing attractive, quality books. Newspaper editors have a difficult time separating the "real published books" from print-on-demand books. If you don't know the signs, you'd never know the difference.

So what does this mean for the industry? In general, doors are opening for print-on-demand books. I think that there will be a backlash of monumental proportions. The Wall Street Journal suggests that Amazon's business will go up. That's highly doubtful. I can easily see Indy publishers and print-on-demand authors banding together to come up with a new way to get their work to the marketplace. And of course, let's not forget about boycotting Amazon.

As for me and Gasp, I have often linked to Amazon when talking about a book. We'll see if that continues.

Comments

[Joshua James]

Interesting.

Though my experience has been that far, far too many POD companies are simply scamming wannabe authors for money, the possible exception being LULU - But the majority of them (I'm thinking Publish America, etc) are taking your money and you don't get the same product you would if you were to use a regular publishing house.

A good friend of mine self-published a book, he edited it well and it did well . . . but I've seen many, many others that were far worse (and I've had plays including in collections that were POD by the editor and they were of terrible quality) . . .

I guess I'm still of the mind, myself, that authors should get paid for their work, not pay other people so that their work gets published.

Otherwise it feels too much like an actor having to pay for the privilege of auditioning.

Just my opinion, of course.

[Scott Walters]

I am mortified, because I am just in the process of trying to self-publish a series of books to be sold through print-on-demand via Amazon. The fact is that, far from paying to have my work done instead of being paid, self-publishing will allow me to keep a larger portion of the sale of each book. I have been published through McGraw-Hill -- of course, a major textbook publisher. First, they priced our book at a far higher price than we wanted -- $32+ for a 120-page book. My co-author and I each receive about $1.50 for each copy published. This is a HUGE rip-off, and also because of the high list price there were fewer sales than there should have been. The first print run was around 3000 copipes, I believe, and is just selling out -- we sold about 900 copies over the past six months. We're planning on re-issuing the book at a lower price accompanied by a series of smaller books (on on acting, one on directing, one on design) to supplement the original text. So this policy cuts me to the heart.

Self-publishing through print-on-demand has totally changed the publishing game -- all the old ideas about self-publishing should be thrown out.

[Scott Walters]

Update: this seems to be true, at least for the moment. Lots of people up in arms. The demand Amazon is making: 48% discount on each book sold. Pretty steep!

[trav]

@Scott Walters
What I am trying to figure out is if you can still sell your product on Amazon, if you became an "Amazon Merchant". So far I haven't found where this would not work. You would have to pay the "merchant fee", but you'd have your own Amazon Shop that would have its products listed within Amazon searches.

Have you seen anything to the contrary?

I also have to agree with Joshua James' comments about the mess that vanity presses can do. I do like the great equalizing factor that POD has created though (not too mention the flexibility traditional publishers have now).

I had always wished that Amazon would just flag them somehow, so one would know if they were looking at a POD book or not. That's all. Just let me know, up front, if this book made its way through some skilled editors or not.