Sunday, September 16, 2012

Amazon Author Page

As many know, Amazon allows those who have books listed on Amazon (which is everybody and anybody without discretion) to have an Author Page. They also allow for blog posts from outside blogs to show up on that page. I often take advantage of this to let potential buyers know that they'll get the better price and correct information about any of my books via my publisher and not Amazon.

Amazon isn't a distributor, they don't get information from the publisher and they don't worry about whether the book they're listing is something they can legally list or not. But then, they don't have to because technically they're not a distributor.

What Amazon does (in relation to selling published books) is to merely list the data dump of books with official ISBN's that they receive on a regular basis. It's a quite an ineffective method to say the least. Currently Amazon has for sale by Amazon two of my books that they can't even legally list yet they won't remove them. Other sellers can of course sell them but not Amazon. They pretty much operate above the law most of the time. 

For every publisher who is forced to use "distributors" such as Ingram's Lightning Source or Amazon's Create Space, because they don't and never will qualify to use Ingram and Baker & Taylor or Heaven forbid Bookmasters, selling directly to the buying public is their best bet. The publisher can even offer deeper discounts than ALL the on-line retailers. And of course they can offer better prices than Brick & Mortar stores because . . . well . . . unless you're using the big distributors one doesn't get into Brick & Mortar stores, at least not if you choose not to use an "industry" standard return policy set up to only work for publishers who have distribution through the larger distributors. 

So yes, visit my publishers site and visit SueDent.net to learn more. Hopefully soon it will all come out in the wash!!! Won't that be grand!

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