Commentary on a certain author’s claims about Amazon damaging his sales…
“Lets look at this for a minute – Amazon, a retailer, is discouraging sales. Being of some small journalistic training, I went to Amazon, and found Douglas Preston. Wait, if Amazon is discouraging sales, wouldn’t they not have any material for him on their site? I can get his books on Kindle and in dead tree format. I can’t pre-order his books. Perhaps this is how they are discouraging his sales? Amazon and his publisher don’t have a contract – Amazon doesn’t know that they’ll be getting his latest book when it comes out. Why should they try to sell something they may not get? More importantly why should Amazon even be carrying his books currently except as used materials? They don’t have a contract with the supplier. They can sell what stock they have in paper back and hard back format and sell what’s on their servers in e-book format, if they’re feeling nice about it. They don’t have to sell his materials at all.
The other part of this is even more important – his sales have dropped. According to other articles, Mr. Preston has stated that Amazon has pulled his discounts. Again, I looked on the page – some materials are discounted, some aren’t. But here’s something I’ve not seen anyone talk about – if it requires a discount for your materials to sell, perhaps the suggested retail price is to high.”
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