Amazon have been pushing quite heavily their Booksurge product for quite some time now. It's a print on demand service and for a small publisher it is very expensive. However, I looked at it to do the next couple of books, rather than using Lulu, as it seemed sensible to have the titles inside Amazon as fast as possible. However, there are issues. The Booksurge formats are different to those we currently use, our books cannot be put on Amazon.co.uk only the .com, and we have no guarantee about the quality of the printing.
Today, April 1st, and no it is not an April Fool, there is a furore on the Net as Amazon have said that any POD publishers who use other printers than Booksurge will have their buy buttons on Amazon 'switched off'. Unless we all ship 5 books to Amazon for them to hold in their inventory.
I received an order from Amazon inventory yesterday for 1 book, which I have to ship to me first and then add their shipping labels and then ship to them - hardly an environmentally friendly system. Additionally, Amazon take a 60% discount for our books which with all this extra shipping renders it totally non-profitable to sell through Amazon at all.
So, having just got one of our books to potentially show up as 'in stock'; and be sold through Amazon, we are hit with this announcement. Right now, as we have sold 200 times more books through Lulu than Amazon, I guess none of our titles will be available with Amazon in the future unless they reverse this ridiculous decision. Which is a shame.
Tuesday 1 April 2008
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