If you’re an Indie publisher through Amazon, the price of Print on Demand (POD) is going up next week.
It behooves you to go in and check your pricing to make sure you’re not losing money, especially if you use expanded distribution that allows bookstores to get copies.
FWIW, I did the ‘automated’ update of all pricing and noted some rather ‘interesting’ things…
All of my The Grey Man series lost their categories, along with All territories (worldwide rights) being deselected on most of them and being reset to US only.
The next ‘issue’ was that with the POD price increase coming, I was literally going to lose money on the books in expanded distribution! As I said, I did the auto update and even with the automatic price increase, IF the expanded distribution was still selected, the books were making anywhere from $.03 to $.14!!!
So, I ended up raising the prices by an average of about $.60 per book, just so I get a few pennies more on the expanded distribution!
The other books weren’t quite as bad, but both Rimworld and the Bell Chronicles had issues with territories being deselected, pricing issues, and deselection from expanded distribution.
Talked with John Van Stry at supper last night, and he’s been dealing with the category issues also.
So what I’m saying is… GO CHECK YOUR BOOKS!
Sigh…
Sorry to hear of seller woes. Does your ‘book builder’ have any say in the matter ?
It appears world-wide dumpster fire chaos remains on schedule. I hope you get this straightened out.
My wife went through these woes. She dropped her “print on demand” because of the price increases and went straight e-book.
Interesting peek behind the curtains.
Despite objecting to and holding off from digital media I have come almost full circle as I am reading almost all on my tablet these days. Nevertheless, I’d willingly pay more for the likes of anything you and Ian have or will come up with (except pure Sci-Fi — out of my appreciation arena). There hasn’t been a single selection I haven’t thoroughly enjoyed, and if there were to be a higher cost to keep everyone (including those anthology contributing authors!) producing like quality, I’m all in, dead tree or digital.
So, I should set my VPN for a U.S. sever? 🙂
Apparently Amazon treats authors the way they treat their drivers.
jrg- Working on it…
Bill- Understood, and don’t blame her.
Ed- Sigh… yeah
Bob- Thank you!
Well, now we have additional material for the panel. *SIGH*
Why am I not surprised?
There is good reason I only sell stuff on eBay and not on Amazon.
TXRed- Yep!
Feral- Understood, but books… sigh
Have all y’all looked at other options for hard copy/ebook distribution? Sounds like an extended topic for your next get-together. Amazon is getting quirkier, which makes me wonder how much longer I’ll see favorite authors suddenly “left” off listings.
PK- Starting to look into that now.